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Into the Amazon Brazilian explorer and social activist Sydney Possuelo believes his country’s uncontacted Indians should remain isolated. Why, then, is he risking his life to find them?

BY SCOTT WALLACE PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICOLAS REYNARD

Bohemian Rhapsody In the trendy Paris neighborhood of the Marais, cultures and lifestyles mix and match, and laissez-faire rules.

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The Driest Place on Earth Parts of Chile’s Atacama Desert haven't seen a drop of rain since recordkeeping began. Somehow, more than a million people squeeze life from this parched land.

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Alaska’s Wild Archipelago 4 gale-swept refuge, imperiled marine mammals, and some of the most lucrative fisheries in the world make for stormy times on the last frontier.

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Royal City of the Maya For some 400 years the Maya reigned triumphant from Guatemala’s Piedras Negras. Then somebody kid- napped the king.

BY MARGARET G. ZACKOWITZ

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Zimbabwe’s Bitter Harvest With the onset of land reform, whites lost farms, blacks lost jobs, and the country that once fed much of southern Africa lost the means to feed itself.

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ZipUSA: 15222 The Strip: 24 hours in Pittsburgh’s revitalized warehouse district means 24 hours of feasting and fun.

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ALLEGRA® (fexofenadine hydrochloride} Capsules and Tablets

‘Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis

ALLEGRA fnicate fo the ree! ymplomsavsxtated with seacnal ale rit ada and children 6 year jf ageand older Symkots tated effectively were sacesing. rhanenrben fy nexe/palateltvet, tw watery /red Cal

‘Chronic. Wiopathic Urticaria ALLEGRA ns indicated for treatment of uncomplicated van martestatior, of chroma mhopathac urticana m aduity and huklren 6 years of ae ad older, ugilcarty reduces pruritus and the number of wheats.

CONTRAINDICATIONS ALLEGRA contraindated in pahents with known hypersertty to any of ity ingredients

PRECAUTIONS

adenine rie Norah benem et mil 3m) Metabollam, However, co-adminostration of

{esolenadine hydrochlonde with ketoconazole and erythromycin led ta mcremyed playa levels of lexalenadine bydrochlonde Feaulenadine tnytroctlonde had no effect on the pharmacokinetics of erythromycin and Ketocona- Zale. wo septate tude fexotenadime hydrochloride 120 meg tite daily (hwo times the recommendes wwe ad dose} win coattminsteret with exythuamcin 500 mg every 8 hours or ketoKonazote 400 rg once casly under steady Mate conditions to normal, healthy wolunteery i= 24, each sth). No diflerences wn adverie events or QT, enterval were observed when patients were administered fewlenurdine hydrochloride alone oF wr conibunation with ery ‘mycin ketoconazole. The findings ofthese studs ate summarized i the following table:

fects on steady-state fexofenadine hydrochloride pharmacokinetics alter 7 days of co-administration with fexofenadine hydrochloride 120 mg every 12 houry {two times the recommended twice daily dose} in normal volunteers (n=24)

(Concomitant Ory Comet Meus (Pek pleura (Essent of syste ‘concentrations eqpoure)

fxvthnoenycin 028 10%

(5000 mg every ft

Aetoconavale 105% +1688

(400 mice cay)

The changes in playin level were within the rime of phnena levels actwewed tn adrquate and well-controlled veal tra,

the mechanism ofthese interactions has been evaluate i vit i sit. and in iv animal modes These stad ev indicate thal ketoconazole or erythromycin co-adminntration enhances fewtenadine gauronitedinal abortion ‘nv ve0 animal tutes sho sug that in addition to cree abrorption. Ketoconazole decreases tewlenadine hydro ina secretion, while erythromycin muy abo dexrease biliary excretion

‘Adeninistration of 120 mg of lexoleriadine trdrocblorde (2 x 60 ng capules within 15 eniwutes of an aluminum and mugiesiuns containing attocid (htaakae”) decreased fevatenulnw: AUC by 41% and Cy 409% ALLEGRA should not be takes chovely in time with aluminaimn and magnesium containing antic

Carcinogenesis, Mutagenesis, Impairment of Fertility

The carcinogen potential and eeptxiuctve ont of fesotenadine tydrotionde were assed wing teferadine studies with adequate fenolenadine hydrochlonde exposure (bined on plana aredunderthe-concenttabon tie [AUX] values, No erdenee of carcinogenicity wis obxerved in an {ieenonth study m mace and vn a Menonth say 1m salsa ofa dees up to 1 t/ha terrane [which Je to fenateradinneexpenares that were rexpectivey -avortnimately 3 anit 5 fies the expowure front the mami recommended datty ol dove ot Helenadline thyroxine i antl anc chien)

‘nin vir (Bacteria Reverse Mutat, CHO/MGPRT forward Mutation and Rat Lymphocyte Cromasoml Aberration <p) and i vo (Mouse Bone Maro Mcronucleu aay) tet. teulenodine Iyrochlonde revealed 0 evidence cof mutagenicity

‘na Feit studies, done teated reductions im implant and wereases in poscimplantation kes were observed at an otal dine of 150 myo terfeuatine (whic le to fexofenadine hydrohinede expoware that were appre ‘mately times the exposure ofthe raximun eecommended daily otal dee of feaatenadie trochloene m adults)

Pregnancy

Teratogenic Effects: Category C. There was 1 evidence ol feratinereity ats er rabbits a ora dane ol frre dire up 90 ry (wich led Yo Fexalenaetine exprvuts thot wene arpreumaiey 4 and 31 tines, texpestvey, the ‘exprnare fom the muitium recommmended daily otal dove of fexofenadine adults

There ave na adequate and well controfied studies in pregnant women. Fexoleranfine shovlt be aved doting, peegrianey only it the potential berielit justibes the potentaal tnd to the fetus.

Nonteratogenic Effects. Dine-related decreanes in pups weight gain and survival Were cvervet in fats exposed to an eral ene of 150 mg/h of teense appronimatey times Nhe masurum recommended ity oral dove of fx ‘oleruaine hydroxtionde a adults tired on companyon of fictersdine hydrochloride ALK)

‘Nursing Mothers

here ate 0 adequate and well-controlled studies in women during lxtation. Because many drugs are excreted in ‘hutnan nih, caution should be exercied when fexofenadine Pytrochlonde m admintsteted to a rutwng wom,

Pediatric Use

The recomunene! dle Wn patients 6 t0 11 years of age based on crow-tudy comparnon of the pharmacokinetics ‘ot ALLEGRA in adults and pedatic patients andion the safety protile of fexotenadhine tydecxtorice in bot adult. and Dediatri patients af doses equal to ot higher than the recommended des

‘The safety of ALLEGRA tablets at a dove of 30/mg twice daily has been demonstrated in 404 pediatric patients. 6 10 11 years al age i tW0 placeborcontralled 2-week seasonal allergic chimitis tials. The safety of ALLEGRA forthe West: rent of chronic idiapathic urticaria in patients 6 lo 11 years of age ts based on crossstuny companson of the phar ‘macokinetics of ALLEGRA yn adult and pediatric patents and on the salety proile of feuolenadine it both adilt and Deatiatric patients at doses equal to or higher thir the recommended dose

The effectiverien of ALLEGRA forthe treatment of seasotal aera rhnites an patests 6 to 11 years of age was demon strated none tia (=411) on which ALLEGRA tablets 30 mg twice daly sagnifcanthy reduced total wmptom scores compared to phxebo, along with extrapolation of demonstrated etlicacy in patents ages 12 years.and above, and the ‘pharmacokinetic eornpanyorrs i adults and chiidfen. The effectiveness of ALLEGRA forthe treatment of conc ii ‘attic uricana in patients 6 10 V1 years of age 6 tuned om an extrapolation of the demonstrated efficacy of ALLEGRA 1m adults with thes condition and the likelihood that the dvewme course, pathology and the drug's eflect are ‘wabstantially sina i ctuldren to that of adh patients

The safety and etfectivenes of ALLEGRA in pexlatric patients under «years of age have nok been established,

Geriatric Use

‘Cindi stdhes of ALLEGRA tablets and caypustes dit not include sutfitert numbers of subjects aiged 65 years aid over {a determine whether this population teypods difterenthy trom younger pabents. Other reported clinical ewperrnce thas pot identified Uitlerences in responses between the geriatric and younger patients. Thes drug ts known 10 be substantially excreted bn the kidney, and the rk of tow reachons to thes drug may be greater in gutients with ‘imppured renal function. Because eldery patents are more likely fo Have deweased real function, care showld be taken in done selextion, and may be useful to monitor renal hunction. (See CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY)

ADVERSE REACTIONS

‘Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis

‘Adults. In. paxebo controlled seasonal allergic hints clea tals sn gattenty 12 years ot ape and oder, which nchided 246) patients reefing feanlenadiie Nydroxhoride capsules at doves cf 20 mg to 240 mig twice dich, aden events were smilie knoleraatine hytioctoede and placebo-treated patients. Al adhere events that were teported by greater thin 1% of patients who receneat the recommended day dove of fexnkenuxtine tydrochondte {4 ny capes twice ily and that were more common with trxalenadine Indroctlonde than placebo, are Hist (Ww Tae 1

Ja placebo controled clinical study in the United Stites. which inclvdet 570 patients age 12 yeats ant older recere ‘ng lesoesadine hydrochloride tablets. dines of 128 oF TER erg ance day, acherse events were Mi nt lens raive tinetonile std ghaccertreaed patients. Table 1 abso li athvene experiences that were reported by {eater than 2% of patients treats! with fesofenadine hydro Moride tablets at denes of YD mg ce daily and that ‘were mare comenon with fexolenaine hydraxhlonide thin placebo.

The incidence of verse event including. rowsiess. was fe dose-related and was vera across subgroups defied boy ape. pend, and race

Table 1 Adverse experiences in patients ages 12 years and older reported in placebo- controlled seasonal allergic rhinitis clinical trials in the United States daily dosing with fexofenadine capsules at rates of greater than 1%

Adverse experenee exchenge 62 Phocebo Noace Oady Tiwe Bouly 6 ree?) ‘Varad infection jovi, tha) 2% ~ Nanes al is Dywnenornes 1" oN Orowruness ca om Opera 13s 06%, Fatigue 18 ow ‘Once daily dosing with fexofenadine hydrochloride tablets at rates of greater than 2 Advene expenemce Kewferadine 780 vg Placebo ‘one daily (029% (n= 283) Meantacte mee 7 Upper Repitatory tract Infechon ns i” ‘Back Pan = nod

‘The frequency and magnitude of Lborafary aboonafities weve simar in fexotenurine tatehioride ad pve treated patents

Pediatric. Laie 2 fies adverse experiences in palit ged 6 1011 year of age which were reported by greater than 2s of patient treated with fexatenadine hydrochlorde tablets ata dove of 30 mg twice day in placebo controlled seasonal aller hve stuies in the United States and Canada that were sare common with evolenadine ‘mndroctilonde than placebo

Table2 Adverse experiences reported in placebo-controlled seasonal allergic rhinitis studies in pediatric patients ages 6 to 11 in the United States and Canada at rates of greater than 2s

Adhere expenence Fewfenadine 10 me Phocebo Doe daly n=229) n= 208 Weadache 78 oes Aecaderital begury Poul i> Coupon, as BEd Fever Pay On fain 2s Oae ‘nits Media 2a aN [Upper Resptatory Trot tiertion 4% 1% ‘Gronic Wdiopathic Urticaria

Adverse evens reported by puthents 12 years of age and older i placebo contra wank: aliogfic rica studies were similar to the reported in plaveto-controlled yeasoral allergic rhinitis sade. tn phacebo-controled ctironic idiopathic urticaria clinical tat, which included 726 pabents 12 yeury of age and oer receiving Heol» dine tydtochlonide tablets at doves of 20 10 240 rng twice daly, adverse event were sralar i fenoteiadne: Inydachloride and placebo-treated patients Fable 3 Inks adverse experiences in patients agra 12 years and older which were reported by greater than 2% of patient treated wath frsakenadine tydrochloride 6 rm tablets twice diy 1 cantyolled clinical stnkies m9 the United States and Canada ane that were more coynmon watt fexatenaine ‘hydrochloride than placebo. The safety of fexatersadine trexhoride i the treatment of chronic wiopathec urticaria in pedoti patients 6 10°11 years of age ms tse on the salty profile of Fewlenadine teachonide in adults and adolescent patients at doses equa to oF higher than the cecommeniled doe ser Pediatin Use

Table 3

Adverse experiences reported in patients 12 years and older in placebo-controlled chronic ‘idiopathic urticaria studiesin the United States and Canada at rates of greater than 25

Advene expert Fenaferadive 60 mp Placebo

tae daly (n= 178)

(= 186)

Back Pitt pra 1% ‘Sirus 2 1th Dezines 25 06% Drowunes 2m 00% {vents that have been reported during controlled clinical triahs involving seasonal alergie tiitiy and chron

wdopathic urticara pubents with inodenees lew than 155 and umikar Yo placebo and have been earely reported dunnig postmarketing surverilance iechude. imo, nerousnen, and seep dhorders or parcniria. tn rare CAH, anh, untkcana, pruritus and byperserrtrty reaction with manifestations yuch ay ammpoedier, chest tities, yvonne, hating and yulernic anaphiyann have been tepottes

OVERDOSAGE

Reports ol feastenadine hydrechlonide overtone hive been nlfequeri and conti lined information, Hineves ches, droneutess ad dey mouth have been reported. Sang doses of fesolenadine hydrochloride wp 10800 my (ex nna volunteers at this done Hevel. and doses wip to 8 mg twice iy for T manth three normal volunteers a this doe evel or 240 ang once daly foe 1 year 4 nat volunteers at tvs dove level} were administered with ‘Ut the development of dinxaly vgniicant averse events. 2s compared to places

tn the event of overdone. consider wanckard meauires 10 renKne any unabsorbed drug Wweptomwtx and supportive treatment 19 recommended

Heaadialyy didnot efecively emowe fexofenatine toxoid fm boa (1.7% removed lowing, eens ‘ine ademinearation

io deaths occurred at ora done of frustenadine ition up Yo SO mg/h eice (310 ines the mama trcormmede aly ral dew adult and 28 tines the mxwnnn recommended daily ora done i children bases ‘on mgt aut up to S00 agin ats (230 fines the manemam recommeded dal oral doe in adults and 400 tives the mawimin recommend daily oxal do incre tse ott age). Aclioraly, na chica sgn cof uty ot rons putholempcal landings were obnerved tn dogs. na evidence of tovcity was observed at oral des up to 2000 mg/kg (00 times the masini recommeded daily oral dove i adults and S30 times he rrnmum recommended daily cra dove mn <hdren based a tg/m)

‘Seasonal Allergic Rhinitis

‘Adults and Children 12 Years and Older. thie eevommended sow of ALLEGRA 60 ng tce daly, oF 8D rR ONCE dary. A dose of 6 mg once day recommended as the starting dave in patients with decreased renal function (ee CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY),

Ghildren 6 10 11 Years. The recommend! dhe ul ALLEGRA 6 30 mg twice daly. A dere of 30 ng nce dit Fe ‘ommended asthe sarting dase in pediatic patents with decreased renal funtion baw CUNKCAL PHARMIALDLOGY) Chronic Idiopathic Urticaria

‘Adults and Children 12 Years and Older. Ihe vocomimeniied Gove of ALLEGRA «00 tng twice dilly. A ove of 6 mg onke daily is recommended as the viarting dove in paterits with decreased renal function (see CLINICAL PHAR: MACOLOGY)

Children 6 Vo 11 Years. The recommended de ot ALLEGRA in 30 mig ce daly A dove of 30 mg.once daly re commended an the sLarting dene m pedhatre paberts with decreavedd renal tunction (see CLINICAL PHARMALOLOGY) Please se product sncut foe tll presi information

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rom the Editor

etting the picture has long been a mission of National

GeoGrapuic. Yet there are times when our desire to peer

into the remotest corners of the world must be stifled— or so argues Sydney Possuelo, a man on a mission of his own.

Working deep in the Amazon, Possuelo (above, at center) is a sertanista, a uniquely Brazilian occupation that’s equal parts Indian rights activist, government bureaucrat, ethnographer, and wilderness tracker. Earning his spurs in the 1970s by establishing the first contact between some of Brazil’s most isolated Indian tribes and the outside world, Possuelo believed he was improving the lives of indigenous peoples. But after witnessing how alcohol, logging, and non-native cultures ravaged Indian communities, Pos- suelo had an epiphany: The only way to save uncontacted peoples was to seal off their territory from outsiders. The story of his effort to protect a tribe known as the Flecheiros begins on page 2. Possuelo’s critics have accused him of playing God. Why, they

argue, should isolated tribes die from malaria when modern med- icine has a cure? Yet through a different lens, Possuelo can be seen as a man with an abiding faith in the wisdom of people who are all but invisible to us. While the journalist in me cringes at the idea of averting our gaze from anything, there may be times when the only right thing to do is to set aside our cameras—and our

curiosity—and take no pictures at all.

@ Watch my preview of the September issue on National Geographic Today on August 17 at 7 p.m. and again at 10 p.m. (ET and PT) on the National Geographic Channel

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

WILLIAM L, ALLEN Editor in Chief

BERNARD OHANIAN, Associate Editor ROBERT L. BOOTH, Managing Editor

SENIOR EDITORS

DON BELT, Geography and World Affairs DENNIS R. DIMICK, Environment WILLIAM T. DOUTHITT, Story Development JOHN A. ECHAVE, Research Grant Projects CHRIS JOHNS, Illustrations

KENT J. KOBERSTEEN, Photography

LISA MOORE LAROE, Staff Writers VALERIE A. MAY, New Media

PETER MILLER, Expeditions

OLIVER PAYNE, Manuscripts

CONSTANCE H. PHELPS, Design LESLEY B. ROGERS, Research CHRISTOPHER P. SLOAN, Art

EDITORIAL

Assistant Editors: Joel K, Bourne, Jr., Hillel J Hoffmann, Peter L. Porteous, Jane Vessels. Articles Editors: Lynn Addison, M har, Glenn Oeland, Barbara Paulsen, Jennifer Reek. Senlor Writers: John L Bliot, Alan Mairson, Cathy Newman, Tom 0 Cliff Tarpy, A. R. Williams, Margaret G, Zackowi Writers: Glenn Hodges, Jennifer Steinberg # Michael Klesius, Karen E. L Lynne War Research: David Bir stor: A Tipton, Asst. Director; Senior Researchers: Victoria ©. Ducheneaux, Alice J. Dunn, Patricia 8, Kel Kathy 8. Maher, Barbara W. McConnell, Mary McPeak Jeanne E. Peters, David W. Woodde Jennifer L. Fox, Nora Gallagher, Mary J, Larson, Cathleen S, Lineberry, Nancie Majkowsk Robin A. Palmer, Heidi Schultz, Christy Ullrich,

New Media: ‘a Franklin Barbajosa, Senior Writer; Amanda MacEvitt, Producer. TV Liaison: Carol

Kaufmann

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Asst, Director Allard, Jodi Cobb, Michael Nichols, Mark Thiessen, Photo Engineering: Lawrence B. Maurer. Editors; Bert L. Fox, Todd James, Elizabeth Krist, Kathy Moran, Kurt F. Mutchier Christopher Scaptura, Susan Welchman. Design: Robert Gray, David C. Whitmore, Asst. Dir Elaine H, Bradley, Designers: Betty Clayman-DeAtiey, Jennifer C. Ct Laundon; Janel Kiley. rey L, Osborn, Asst ‘ors; Kris Hannah; Christopher A. Klein, Artist Ellie Boettinger, Ann R. Perry, Research. Engraving and Printing: George Bounelis, Director; Judy 1 Garvey, William D. Reichert

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The cover story on mammals in- spired the most letters this month— about a quarter of them devoted

to Robert Clark’s cover shot of new

4 Mammals

mother Julie Marques and her

daughter, Amelia. “It beautifully captures the bond between mother and child,” wrote one mother. But critics of evolution took strong exception to the article. Wrote one: “For the record, my ancestral mother was named Eve.”

The Rise of Mammals The mother-and-child picture on the cover is a masterpiece. How anyone can look at that darling child that only nine months before was a pinhead- size egg and think this magical development was only a blind accident of chance is beyond me. RALPH SICKLES

Tempe, Arizona

When I open up most maga- zines, I expect to see nothing but photos of perfectly sculpted models with flawless complex- ions. From Nationa GEo- GRAPHIC, however, I expect something a little closer to real- ity. The woman pictured on the opening pages of this article looks like a supermodel who just happens to be pregnant. If you are going to have a picture of a nude pregnant woman, why don’t you show one who looks like the other 99 percent of us— stretch marks, cellulite, water retention, and all. Don’t women

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have enough perfection to com- pare themselves to already? ELISABETH D, BEUTLER Phoenix, Arizona

The caption on page 21 states that Asian mammals crossed the Bering Strait land bridge to North America during a period of intense global warming. But I thought the land bridge formed during periods of global cooling, which allowed for the formation of glaciers that locked up water, lowered ocean levels, and ex- posed the bridge. It’s counterin- tuitive that a land bridge would form with higher ocean levels. BRUCE KLEIN Redmond, Washington

What you describe is correct for recent times, but 50 million years ago conditions were different. Sea level was not affected by melting ice but by continental drift and mountain building. The land bridge was exposed despite the warmth of the early Eocene.

What’s New at Gombe

I have just left Gombe National Park to write my Ph.D. disser- tation after six and a half years studying the chimpanzees there. It is my opinion that the immediate threat to the chimps

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Binturong (Arc: Size: Head and

Heads or tails? For the binturong it hardly matters which end is up. Prehensile at the tip, its long and muscular tail

ot only grips branches but also serves the civet as a brake when running down trees and as a prop when standing on its hind legs. Awkward on land, these consummate climbers spend most of their nocturnal waking hours combing the rainforest canopy for f Fruit dominates their diet, but they adroitly prey on

NATURE

small animals as well; to bag a d ance, they leap nearly two meters in the air and land squarely on it f though they are, binturongs cannot evade the dangers posed by habitat loss and hunting

As an active, committed global corporation, we join worldwide efforts to promote awareness of endangered spedes, Just one way we are working to make the world a better place—today and tomorrow

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Chiru Poaching in Tibet’s Chang Tang

I’m curious as to why the chiru are killed to get their wool.

Why not capture and domesti-

cate some so the wool could be

shorn like sheep or alpac GREGG ESHELMAN Weiser, Idaho

China is reportedly investigat- ing this possibility. However, such a venture will likely prove unprofitable, says George Schaller, author of our story. “Better to spend the money on protection and management.”

It’s impossible to enforce laws protecting the chiru in the reserves because the terrain is too rugged, and conservation officers often lack staff, equip- ment, and funding, The only

way to stop poaching and fur trading is to change opinions of the people who buy prod- ucts made from chiru wool. Once consumers understand the true price—that tens of thousands of these lovely ani- mals have to be killed—the future of the Tibetan chiru can be promising. ZHANG YANG Christchurch, New Zealand

As a Kashmiri from the Indian side, I have seen scores of women working the chiru wool on their spinning wheels. It was their livelihood, and I

JOWELL

don’t know what they will do now for a living. However, the whole issue was turned into a populist gambit by the gov- ernment of Faroog Abdullah, the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. The local newspapers also portrayed it as yet another method of “Indian aggression” aimed at destroying the livelihood of Kashmiris. But the govern- ment should have informed people associated with the trade about the pressing need to save chiru from extinction. MURTAZA SHIBLI London, England

/ THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT THIS ELEGANT AUTOMOBILE THAT MIGHT SURPRISE YOU.

of Gombe is disease. Since I started research in 1996, the chimpanzees experienced

at least four serious outbreaks. Three of these were respiratory in nature, and the ease with which they spread led us to conclude that the source must have been a human one. Possible human vectors include tourists, local villagers, and researchers. Without Jane Goodall the chim- panzees and the forest that is Gombe would no longer exist.

Yet research and tourism, despite their protective role, have

National Geographic Magazine, PO Box 98199, Washington, DC 20090-8199, or by fax to 202-828-5460, or via the Internet to ngsforum@nationalgeo graphic.com. Include name, address, and daytime telephone. Letters may be edited for clarity and length

introduced other threats. Great apes are simply unsuited to con- servation strategies that place them in proximity to humans. ELIZABETH GREENGRASS Hellevoetsluis, Netherlands

Whenever I see a picture of Jane Goodall—skin wrinkled from endless hours outdoors, eyes alight with warmth and keen intelligence, and silvery hair pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail—l feel like sending copies of the photo to all of those expensive, high-toned cosmetic companies, along with notes saying: “Hey, guys—this is what real beauty looks like! Quit spending your massive resources on artifice, and start channeling it into things that really matter!” JOANN M. DAVIS Albuquerque, New Mexico

On pages 88-9 you depict chimps termite fishing. Two years ago while traveling in Africa, | found myself in a tent beside a huge termite mound. Having tasted ants as a biology graduate student, I was curious to learn how termites tasted. The chimps seemed to enjoy them. | dutifully selected what I thought was a proper twig and then spent the next hour fishing. Not having been taught by my mother like the chimps are, my catch was absolutely zero. Imagine how utterly stupid I felt in front of the amused local people when I,a Ph.D., couldn’t accomplish what the chimps did so easily.

FP. M. STURTEVANT

Sarasota, Florida

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Conservationist Mike Fay trekked 2,000 miles across Africa—and helped preserve 10,000 square miles of vital habitat!

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a Habitat Hero! Every action coun

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GEOGRAPHY ACTION! 2003 Habitats: Home Sweet Home

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killed and taken prisoner. Upon their return,

they are not welcome as members at Augusta

National Golf Club. Shame on Augusta, and

on every professional golfer who would con-

sider playing at such a place. True freedom

means different things to different people,

but it should definitely include the end to all

types of discrimination.

GREGORY TIKKA Kenai, Alaska

expect balanced reporting and fairness in your magazine, but this article just rehashed what has been in the media while ignoring the facts. Club chairman Hootie Johnson’s bank loaned money to African-American businessmen when other banks would not. He campaigned for black political candidates when it was not very popular. The University of South Carolina’s women’s golf team was

nis guest at Augusta, and he let them use the champions’ locker room. JEFF BRITT

Tucson, Arizona

Caves of Oman Living in the Sultanate of Oman for two years gave me the opportunity to experience the awesome grandeur of the Eastern Hajar range. The sultanate remains relatively unde- veloped for tourists, but it is a country well worth visiting. However, the region’s stark beauty could so easily be adversely affected if unsympathetic development takes place in the bid to put Oman on the tourist map. The prospect of cable railways and lookouts is not one I would favor. I would certainly encour- age some further development for tourists’ comfort and convenience, but care is needed. BRIAN SMAILES

Ewelme, England

I am an Omani living in the United States.

I was so proud to see my country featured in NATIONAL GeoGrapuic. You did a pretty accurate job of capturing Oman and its beauty. I was amused to see on your website that the author listed the emptiness of Oman as one of the worst parts of his trip there. It reminded me of the time my husband almost ran us off the road when I commented on how exotic his native lowa was.

FADYA ALBAKRY

Austin, Texas

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

Corsica An independent Corsica? No way! It’s clear from your article that Corsican separatists are terrorists and mafia who don’t speak for the majority of the population. French main- landers in Corsica don’t walk around with bullwhips forcing shackled Corsicans to toil for them. The use of troops to put down a rebellion in the 1970s was nothing but the restoration of law and order. France’s prov- inces are diverse enough to use some decen- tralization, but not independence. DMITRIY TARASOV Richmond, Virginia FROM OUR ONLINE FORUM nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0304

On pages 58-9 you depict what you describe as a Greek Orthodox Holy Week procession in the village of Cargése. The churchgoers on those pages are not Orthodox at all. They are Eastern Rite Catholics who follow the Byzan- tine, or Greek, Rite of the Catholic Church. This explains why Monsignor Fiorenzo Mar- chiano can tend to both flocks and explains his statement that “when I am with Greeks, 1 am Greek. When I am with Romans, I am Roman.” He is speaking of the two rites of the Catholic Church followed by Corsicans: the Greek Rite and the Latin Rite. JAN LOKUTA Milford, Pennsylvania

Geographica: Sudan’s “Lost Boys” My family has been blessed by the addition of two Dinka boys, officially aged 17, who have lived with us as foster children for almost two years now. When they got off the plane from Kenya, our world was completely foreign to them. They faced this new challenge with dignity and humor, and a zest for life we could only admire. We have come to know many of these “lost boys” and marvel at their acceptance of this new life. Their story is tragic, their past a nightmare—but their fu- tures are bright and filled with hope. What a glorious thing for this family to be a part of. LARRY HEWITT Centralia, Washington

We occasionally make our customer list available to carefully screened companies whose products or services may be ot interest to you. f ou prefer nat to receive such ‘mallings, U.S. and Canadian customers please call 1-800-NGS-LINE (1-800-647-5463) Intemational customers please call +1-813-979-6845 or write: National Geographic Society, PO Box 63005, Tampa, FL 33663-3005. Please Include the address area from your magazine wrapper when writing

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

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i) Harley's s s Midlife s s Crisis As its riders age, are sales figures born to be mild?

arley-Davidson turns a hundred years old this month, and business is vrooming. Some 264,000 of its heavyweight “hogs” were shipped to dealers last year. But there’s a bump in the road ahead: Harley’s best customers are now middle- aged men—baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964—and that doesn’t bode well for future sales. The median age of American motorcycle buyers was 32 in 1990; in 1998 it was 38. Harley's typical buyer in 2001 was even older at 46. Boomers’ love for the brand makes sense. Harley’s rep- utation as the tough-guy’s bike of choice blossomed when boomers were young and impressionable. Plus, many riders can’t afford the motorcycles, which can cost around $20,000, until middle age. The company’s decision to market its leather-jacket image to white-collar workers helped bring it back from the brink of bankruptcy in the mid-80s.

Yet the same demographic that saved the legendary motorcycle company will cause it trouble in a decade or two. By then, boom- ers may be getting too old to buy motorcycles. The smaller, post- boom generation that arrived as

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

1T1CA.

: UNDO ® sce

GEOGRAPHICA

birthrates declined in the 1960s probably won't supply enough potential consumers to step into boomers’ motorcycle boots, And they’re unlikely to feel particu- larly nostalgic for Harley's Easy Rider image and trademark engine roar.

Today bikers in their 20s prefer to ride something flashier and cheaper. So Harley is re- tooling its appeal with sportier- style cycles (like the V-Rod, below) and less expensive mod-

els. And it’s going after a new

demographic: women. The company’s female buyers have already increased from 2 percent in 1987 to 9 percent in 2001. Since 1999 some 40 percent of the more than 16,000 people who have taken the riding les- sons offered at many dealerships are women.

Of course, the aging baby boom won't be a bust for every industry. Demographer Cheryl Russell predicts that boomers who backpacked around the world in their youth will have time and money to set out again—this time in a bit more style. So travel businesses should prosper in the future. Another winner, already on the ri the alcoholic beverage category. “Every generation has

y is in

own association with alcohol,” Russell explains, “The World War II group drank hard liquor. Baby boomers will be drinking a lot more wine.”

—Margaret G. Zackowitz

Getting Old Is a Pain

By 2025 the 78 million members of the baby-boom generation will range from 61 to 79 years old and represent 25 percent of adults in the U.S. Boomers can be expected to have more health care needs as they age, but not necessarily for the same set of ailments that plagued their par- ents. Doctors are already seeing an increase in sports injuries among the middle-aged. Emergen- cy rooms admitted one-third more injured boomers in 1998 than they did in 1991; bicycling and basketball most often put them there. But midlife jocks shouldn't bench themselves. Exercising into old age is commendable, say doctors—just stretch first.

WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE

Find links and resources selected by our Research Division at nationalgeo graphic.com/ngm/resources/0308.

Great Apes in Great Peril

entral Africa has been a

relatively safe haven for

gorillas and chimpan- zees, compared to East and West Africa, where their habitat has been overrun by human expan- sion. But now thousands of apes in the western part of this region are dying from one of the world’s most dreaded diseases: ebola. s of ebola outbreaks in humans occurred in Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1990s. The virus may have spread from infected primates to hunters killing apes for food or the bush-meat trade. More recently researchers found apes apparently felled by ebola

in Gabon’s Minkébé forest region. “I'd guess thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of gorillas died there,” says William B. Karesh of the Wildlife Conservation Society. Now ebola is striking in the Congo, where the Lossi Gorilla

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

NGS PHOTOGRAPHER MICHAEL NICHOLS Sanctuary has lost about half of its gorilla population. By the time you read this, Odzala National Park (above), which has one of the world’s highest known densities of gorillas, may have become ebola’s next target. —John L. Eliot

Il am stronger than diabetes’,

w i ee oe a . —

FOR PEOPLE WITH TYPE 2 DIABETES Ava na la rosiglitazone maleate “Every big hug makes me glad | take care of my diabetes.”

“My granddaughter sure knows how to make my day. Her face lights up when she sees me. Then, she dishes out those hugs— and that's what really makes me want to take care of my diabetes.

“I've got my routine down: | stay active, and try my best to eat healthier meals. To help me stay on track, my doctor added Avandia. lt makes my body more responsive to its own natural insulin, so | can control my blood sugar more effectively.

“| started on Avandia over a year ago, and while not everyone gets the same results, my blood sugar has never been better. | know Avandia is helping me to be stronger than diabetes. That's something | can really wrap my arms around.”

Avandia, along with diet and exercise, helps improve blood sugar control. It may be prescribed alone, with metformin, sulfonylureas, or insulin. When taking Avandia with sulfonylureas or insulin, patients may be at increased risk for low blood sugar. Ask your doctor whether you need to lower your sulfonylurea or insulin dose.

Some people may experience tiredness, weight gain or swelling with Avandia.

Avandia may cause fluid retention or swelling which could lead to or worsen heart failure, so you should tell your doctor if you have a history of these conditions. If you experience an unusually rapid increase in weight, swelling or shortness of breath while taking Avandia, talk to your doctor immediately. In combination with insulin Avandia may increase the risk of other heart problems. Ask your doctor about important symptoms and if the combination continues to work for you. Avandia is not for everyone. Avandia is not recommended for patients with severe heart failure or active liver disease.

Also, blood tests to check for serious liver problems should be conducted before and during therapy. Tell your doctor if you have liver disease, or if you experience unexplained tiredness, stomach problems, dark urine or yellowing of skin while taking Avandia,

If you are nursing, pregnant or thinking about becoming pregnant, or premenopausal and not ovulating, talk to your doctor before taking Avandia.

See important patient information on the adjacent page.

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Patient Information about AVANDIA® (rosiglitazone maleate) 2 mg, 4 mg, and 8 mg Tablets

What is Avandia?

Avandia is one product in a class of prescription drugs called thiazolidinediones (thigh-a-zol-a-deen-die-owns) or TZDs. It is used to treat type 2 diabetes by helping the body use the insulin that it is already making. Avandia comes as pills that can be taken either once a day or twice a day to help improve blood sugar levels.

How does Avandia treat type 2 diabetes?

If you have type 2 diabetes, your body probably still produces insulin but it is not able to use the insulin effi- ciently. Insulin is needed to allow sugar to be carried from the bloodstream into many cells of the body for energy. If insulin is not being used correctly, sugar does not enter the cells very well and builds up in the blood. If not controlled, the high blood sugar level can lead to serious medical problems, including kidney damage, blindness and amputation.

Avandia helps your body use insulin by making the cells more sensitive to insulin so that the sugar can enter the cell.

How quickly will Avandia begin to work?

Avandia begins to reduce blood sugar levels within 2 weeks. However, since Avandia works to address an important underlying cause of type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, it may take 8 to 12 weeks to see the full effect. If you do not respond adequately to your starting dose of Avandia, your physician may increase your daily dose to improve your blood sugar control.

How should | take Avandia?

Your doctor may tell you to take Avandia once a day or twice a day (in the morning and evening). It can be taken with or without meals. Food does not affect how Avandia works. To help you remember to take Avandia, you may want to take it at the same time every day.

What if | miss a dose?

If your doctor has prescribed Avandia for use once a day:

* Assoon as you remember your missed dose, take one tablet anytime during the day.

¢ If you forget and go a whole day without taking a dose, don't try to make it up by adding another dose on the following day. Forget about the missed dose and simply follow your normal schedule.

jr i A lia for 5

. esd aceo as you remember the missed dose, take one tablet

. Veg the next dose at the normal time on the same

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¢ Don't try to make up a missed dose from the day before.

¢ You should never take three doses on any single day in order to make up for a missed dose the day before.

Do | need to test my blood for sugar while using Avandia?

Yes, you should follow your doctor's instructions about your at-home testing schedule.

Does Avandia cure type 2 diabetes?

Currently there is no cure for diabetes. The only way to reduce the effects of the disease is to maintain good blood sugar control by following your doctor's advice for diet, exercise, weight control, and medication. Avandia, alone or in combination with other antidiabetic drugs (i.e., sulfonylureas, metformin, or insulin), may improve these other efforts by helping your body make better use of the insulin it already produces.

Can | take Avandia with other medications? Avandia has been taken safely by people using other medications, including other antidiabetic medications,

birth control pills, warfarin (a blood thinner), Zantac® (ranitidine, an antiulcer product from GlaxoSmithKline), certain heart medications, and some cholesterol-lower- ing products. You should discuss with your doctor the most appropriate plan for you. If you are taking pre- scription or over-the-counter products for your diabetes or for conditions other than diabetes, be sure to tell your doctor. Sometimes a patient who is taking two antidia- betic medications each day can become irritable, light- headed or excessively tired. Tell your doctor if this occurs; your blood sugar levels may be dropping too low, and the dose of your medication may need to be reduced.

What are the possible side effects of Avandia? Avandia was generally well tolerated in clinical trials. The most common side effects reported by people tak- ing Avandia were upper respiratory infection (cold-like symptoms) and headache. When taking Avandia with sulfonylureas or insulin, patients may be at increased risk for low blood sugar. Ask your doctor whether you need to lower your sulfonylurea or insulin dose.

Some people may experience tiredness, weight gain, or swelling with Avandia.

Avandia may cause fluid retention or swelling which could lead to or worsen heart failure, so you should tell your doctor if you have a history of these conditions. If you experience an unusually rapid increase in weight, swelling or shortness of breath while taking Avandia, talk to your doctor immediately. In combination with insulin, Avandia may increase the risk of other heart problems. Ask your doctor about important symptoms and if the combination continues to work for you. Avandia is not for everyone. Avandia is not recommended for Patients with severe heart failure or active liver disease.

Also, blood tests to check for serious liver problems should be conducted before and during therapy. Tell your doctor if you have liver disease, or if you experi- ence unexplained tiredness, stomach problems, dark urine or yellowing of skin while taking Avandia.

If you are nursing, pregnant or thinking about becom- ing pregnant, or premenopausal and not ovulating, talk to your doctor before taking Avandia, as Avandia may increase your chance of becoming pregnant.

Who should not use Avandia?

You should not take Avandia if you are in the later stages of heart failure or if you have active liver disease. The following people should also not take Avandia: People with type 1 diabetes, people who experienced yellow- ing of the skin with Rezulin® (troglitazone, Parke-Davis), people who are allergic to Avandia or any of its com- ponents and people with diabetic ketoacidosis.

Why are laboratory tests recommended?

Your doctor may conduct blood tests to measure your blood sugar control. Blood tests to check for serious liver problems should be conducted before starting Avandia, every 2 months during the first year, and periodically thereafter.

It is important that you call your doctor immediately if you experience unexplained symptoms of nausea, vom- iting, stomach pain, tiredness, anorexia, dark urine, or yellowing of the skin.

How should | store Avandia?

Avandia should be stored at room temperature in a childproof container out of the reach of children. Store Avandia in its original container.

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The Migration to Nowhere

na few months all eyes will

be on the San Francisco Zoo’s

Magellanic penguins: Will they repeat last winter's bizarre Christmas-to-Valentine’s Day performance? Back then six pen- guins arrived from Ohio's Six Flags and within two hours abruptly led the zoo’s 46 usually languid penguins on a seven-week swim around their pool,

Why the flurry of activity? In

their native South America, Magellanics migrate twice a year some 2,000 miles along the coast in search of food. They then haul out and lay eggs, which is what the zoo birds did after their big swim. “The move to California was timed to coincide with the penguins’ normal migration, so their internal clocks were telling them: Swim!” says Magellanic expert Dee Boersma of the Uni- versity of Washington. “Whatever one penguin does, the rest follow.”

Perhaps this December the cap- tive penguins will sit back and relax, having realized they've got nowhere to go.

—Jennifer Steinberg Holland

This Frog Didn't Croak

magine losing a family heirloom,

only to find it in the backyard

20 years after you'd written it off. That's how investigators felt when they rediscovered the Rancho Grande harlequin frog. Described in 1856, the frogs were so com- mon in Venezuela’s Henri Pittier National Park that biologists col- lected hundreds at a time. Then they seemed to vanish. Not seen since 1982, they were feared extinct. But earlier this year an expedition found 16 frogs in a mountain stream in the park. Why the absence? It

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC +

turns out the frogs had never disappeared entirely, but drought and pollution may have reduced

their numbers. “Few people travel to remote areas of the park,” says Thomas Ryan of the Friends of Henri Pittier National Park Scien- tific Society. “That’s where the spe- cies may be making its last stand.” —John L. Eliot

AUGUST 2003

Enter the } Dragon Fruit

One of the latest foods to satisfy the United States’ appe- tite for the exotic, the dragon fruit is produced by a cactus that can draw moisture from the air like an orchid. Its smooth scales—inspiration for the fanciful name—conceal a succulent, mildly sweet flesh reminiscent of a honeydew melon with a speckling of tiny, crunchy seeds. The biggest specimens plump up to almost three pounds. Native to Cen- tral and South America, where it’s called pitaya or pitahaya, the fruit traveled to Southeast Asia with the French more than a century ago.

Recently U.S. manufacturers of bottled juices began import- ing a frozen puree of the fruit to use as a flavoring. But concerns about fruit-fly infes- tations keep the fruit itself from being imported. So, with savvy consumers and trendy chefs willing to pay up to ten dollars for just one piece of fruit, boutique farmers and backyard gardeners in the U.S. are planting as fast as they can. “A lot of growers thrive on consumers’ bizarre tastes,” says Erik Tietig, whose Pine Island Nursery in Florida offers 16 varieties of pitaya plants. “As long as a fruit looks ridiculous, people will pay a premium for it.”

—A. R. Williams

ART BY M, E EATON, SI

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GEOGRAPHICA

What’s for Dinner? We Are

n 1898 British engineer J. H.

Patterson (above) killed two

huge lions. As we reported in our April 2002 feature, “Mane- less in Tsavo,” the pair had stalled railway construction in Kenya’s Tsavo area by allegedly devour- ing 135 workers. Now two hers at Chicago’s Field

ENCLAVES

Still Seeing Red

Almost 25 years have passed since China began its flirtation with capitalism, which is blos- soming into a full-blown love affair. But one village is still holding a torch for Mao Zedong. After a brief experiment with decollectivization, the citizens of Nanjie decided to re-embrace the ideals of Maoism. Residents returned to communal living and ration books, and every apartment in town has been furnished with

a Mao figurine. Recently Nanjie has become a retro-chic travel stop, Chinese tourists flock to glimpse sights like the People’s Militia marching under banners that pro- mote “eradicating old ways”— meaning capitalism.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Museum of Natural History, Julian Kerbis Peterhans and Thomas Gnoske, have unearthed clues to understanding why the lions be- came man-eaters. Was it because they were sick or injured, as some suggest? The question is more than academic. Though numbers are difficult to come by, lions still

But Nanjie’s Maoist devotion is being tested. Officials are developing a business park to lure foreign inves- tors, displacing more than a hundred villagers and prompting outrage

+ AUGUST 2003

kill scores of people every year. Poring over records from the Tsavo lions’ reign of terror, the researchers discovered the duo may have developed a taste for human flesh from scavenging on the corpses of porters who died on caravans moving through the lions’ territory. Disease had nearly eliminated the buffalo, their natural prey, perhaps mak- ing humans an appealing target. What’s more, hunters had wiped out the elephants that once fed on the overgrown thorn thick- ets from which the Tsavo lions ambushed their human victims. Peterhans and Gnoske did find that both lions’ skulls had damaged teeth. “But we don’t think that caused them to become man-eaters,” says Peter- hans. He estimates that only percent of lions that hunt people or livestock are aged or injured.

“Given the right circumstances,” he says, “any lion is capable of attacking people.”

—John L. Eliot

ITZ HOFFMAN, DOCUMENT CHINA among Nanjie’s 3,100 citizens. Apparently even the oversize statue of Mao that stands guard over the town square can't stop China’s latest

revolution, —Demetra Aposporos

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GEOGRAPHIC

SOCIETY

Photographs of Distinction

Gritty scenes of civil strife earn photographer a top honor

andy Olson’s harrowing

images of war-torn Sudan

in the February 2003 issue, along with his work for two articles from last year, have earned him a prestigious title: He’s been named magazine pho- tographer of the year in the University of Missouri’s annual

Pictures of the Year competition. Randy is only the second pho- tographer to have won both the competition’s magazine and newspaper photographer of the year awards. Above is his pic- ture of a Dinka boy in southern Sudan who has been treated with cattle dung, a makeshift

remedy for an infestation of lice. A set of Randy’s Black Sea photographs also took first place in the feature picture story cat- egory. Lynn Johnson's pictures in last November’s article on weap- ons of mass destruction got top honors for an issue-reporting picture story, while Joel Sartore was awarded first place in the science and natural history cat- egory for a photograph in the March 2002 story on Attwater’s prairie-chickens.

A Chicken’s Progress

nd speaking of those prairie-chickens: Numbers of the endangered bird are up, as is support from read- ers of our March 2002 article. The survival rate after last fall’s release of captive-bred

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC +

birds was the highest since 1996; there are now 58 of the wild grouse in two Texas popu- lations, up from 40 in 2001. Readers gave more than $6,000 in just one month to support breeding and research efforts. Go to nationalgeographic.com/ ngm/0203 to contribute.

AUGUST 2003

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BEAINID THE

SCENES

bservant readers who scanned all 730 of the special protected places

listed in NATIONAL GEOGRAPH- ic’s October 2002 article on UNESCO's World Heritage sites may have noticed one curious

Reef, is also a World Heritage site.) During Sylvia and David’s

fact: Only a handful of marine areas are included. One is the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve Sys- tem, where National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle and Contrib- ve ay uting Photographer- ’ in-Residence David Yucatan Doubilet last fall Penin: celebrated the Fag ¥ World Heritage Bie Convention's 30th anniversary.

“We were there

ten-day expedition, they dove into the Blue Hole Natural Mon- ument (above), a sinkhole 1,040 feet across and 410 feet deep. The pair also witnessed the remarkable vari- ety of organisms that depend on the reef, IZE from hogfish (left) to : banded coral shrimp (bottom left). “Reefs in the Caribbean have declined, as

as ambassadors al S55 for the ocean and — SUATEMAKA 7 » “HONDURAS

its creatures,” says Sylvia. “The World ® Belize Barrier Reef 0 100

: ._ Reserve System Guanoen Heritage system is — World Heritage Site 9 mostly terrestrial. : People don’t usually think of sea creatures as wildlife, but

have most coastal habitats around the world,” says Sylvia, “but the Belize

reefs remain in better condition than most.” A multimedia look at Belize’s barrier reefs, with nar- ration by Sylvia and photographs by David, appears on the Web

at nationalgeographic.com/earth

they are.”

The Belize Barrier Reef System is the longest in the Western Hemisphere. (The world’s lon-

gest, Australia’s Great Barrier pulse/belize.

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creation of an ecologi- cally friendly tourist route link- ing Maya archaeological sites in Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Early this year the project moved closer to reality as the five nations, spurred by the Inter- American Development Bank, joined the Society, Conserva- tion International, and Counter- part International to create the Mundo Maya Sustainable Tour- ism Alliance. The goal: To build and maintain tourist attractions so the Maya and other local peoples can earn a living—while also preserving the environment.

| CHECKING IN

“They were helpless,” wrote wildlife biologist Howard B. Quig- ley in the July 1993 GeocRaPHic. Quigley and his colleagues had found four Siberian tiger cubs whose mother had been killed by poachers in Russia's Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve. Two of the cubs died while Quig- ley and his team were working frantically to ship them to Oma- ha's Henry Doorly Zoo, known for its work with big cats.

A decade later the two re- maining siblings, a male and a female, are still alive, each producing its own offspring. The male, Khuntami (below), remains in Omaha and has

... With Rescued Siberian Tiger Cubs

sired six cubs, two in 2000 and four in 2001. The female, now named Lena after her mother, lives in the Indianapolis Zoo. She gave birth to two cubs in 1998, three in 2000, and two more this year.

Releasing captive tigers into the wild is difficult. Instead, the hope is to provide a gene-pool safety net for the estimated 450 remaining Siberian tigers by transferring the zoo tigers’ genetic material back into the wild via artificial insemination and embryo transfer. Says Lee Simmons, director of the Henry Doorly Zoo: “That's the best use of the captive population.”

JOEL SARTORE

AMAZONIA’S NATIVE CULTURES (PAGE 2)

To learn more about a subject covered in this issue, try these National Geographic Society products and services.

Call 1-888-225-5647 or log on to nationalgeographic.com

for more information.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

1 Death on the Amazon on the National Geographic Channel, August 4, 9 p.m. ET/PT. Follow Brazilian adventurer Sydney Possuelo on an emergency visit to the Korubo tribe. Witness the forces that threaten native groups, from drug smuggling and disease to tribal conflicts.

@ National Geographic Peoples of the World book. A survey of indigenous groups worldwide, with vibrant photos and maps—including a section on the peoples of South America ($40). 1 Amazon Expedition: With National Geographic Expeditions, visit remote villages and experi- ence life along Peru's Amazon River aboard the comfortable cruiser La Amatista, October 25- November 2, 2003. Go to nationalgeographic.com/ngexpeditions or call 1-888-966-8687.

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The wild lion population faces a crisis in Africa, where these majestic predators coexist uneasily with humans and their livestock, Tens of thousands have been lost in the last decade alone. The National Geographic Society is supporting critical field research and outreach with local tribes to avert a potential conservation disaster.

This is just one of many complex problems that Society-funded research grantees help solve. Contact the Development Office or visit us online to support the Society’s conservation efforts and other mission-related programs with a tax-deductible gift.

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THE SCIENCE OF

THINGS

COSMOLOGY

The Multiverse

The universe as we know it just got more complicated

he universe is bigger than we think. This seems to be a cosmic truth. Times change,

theories evolve, astronomers see new things in their telescopes—and the universe always turns out to be vaster and more mind-boggling than any- one suspected. The most dazzling new theory holds that our universe isn’t just big, it’s one of many. It’s like a bubble in a huge vat of beer, and every other bubble is another universe. (We like this image for some reason.)

Our concept of the universe used to be tidier. Ancient Egyptians thought the sky was held up by mountains at the corners of the Earth, and the stars were not so far away. But in the 17th century the telescope shattered that notion. Through the lens, the stars were countless, and space had depth. Stars were suns, rendered faint only by great distance. Then, in 1923, Edwin Hubble proved that mys- terious, wispy things called nebulae are actually galaxies, or “island universes,” outside our own,

New telescopes have since revealed ever more galaxies, and we've grown accustomed to living in Carl Sagan's cos- mos, with billions and billions of galaxies, each utterly lousy with stars. But Sagan may have been underestimating.

A satellite called the Wil- kinson Microwave Anisot- ropy Probe recently captured a glimpse of the residual radiation from the young universe, when there were no galaxies, only

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CARY WOLINSKY

Who Knew?

perturbations in a seething, expand- ing cosmos. The data give a precise age to the universe: 13.7 billion years, plus or minus 200 million years. Per- haps more significantly, the data sup- port the idea of cosmic inflation, a variant of the big bang. ‘The infla- tionary theory states that very early in the expansion the cosmos sud- denly inflated, becoming unimagin- ably vast in a fraction of a second.

If inflation is correct, the universe really is more than a million trillion trillion trillion times larger than the already enormous visible cosmos. It’s practically infinite in scale. You have to speak like a child to convey the idea—it’s basically a gazillion times larger than we thought. And there's more: One variation of the inflation theory suggests that our universe is a calm bubble, a kind of “no inflation zone” within an infinitely large, chaotic, eternally inflating “multi- verse,” and that this multiverse con- tains countless bubble universes, some of which almost surely contain intelligent observers trying to make sense of their own crazy cosmos.

The problem is, a multiverse is a hard theory to prove. “Is this

science? Not yet,” warns cos- mologist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. “We can’t test it.”

But here's the most alarming part about living in a multi- verse. If the cosmos is more or less infinite in scale, then statistical probabilities dictate that somewhere there’s planet identical to Earth, con- taining creatures identical to us, leading identical lives.

We don’t buy it. Could there really be another world where Adam Sand- ler is a movie star?

—Joel Achenbach

WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER

How far apart are those two planets? Scientists measure length in meters. Kilometers and centi- meters are just multi- ples and fractions (respectively) of the basic unit. But exactly how long is a meter? Since 1983 the Inter- national Bureau of Weights and Mea- sures in Sévres, France (keepers by treaty of the world's standard units of measurement), has decreed that a meter is precisely the dis- tance light travels through a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. (How do you measure a hundred-millionth of a second? Don't ask.) That degree of pre- cision matters. If astronomers mea- sured a meter the way most Americans do (“Y'know, about a yard”) imprecision would multiply prodi- giously. Just between Earth and Mars you'd get a measurement mistake four million miles long.

—tLynne Warren

WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE

Learn more about the shape of the cosmos and find links to Joel Achenbach’s work

at nationalgeographic.com/

ngm/resources/0308.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

at

In the heat of the night, Alfredo, Bejou, Jose, and Ramil- Kanamari Indians who have joined Sydney Possuelo’s expedition to safe- guard the Flecheiros —~strip and slather themselves with fruit seeds for a ritual dance that begins a bit self-consciogsly, Outsiders are watch- inggcamera and pen in hand, And.as Possuelo and the Kanamari are well aware, outsiders change everything.

Rew

POSSUELO RACES TO SAVE PEOPLE HE HOPES

Shaking de

plundered timt Brazil's

p into re

er, Siave

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uls have fueled 500 years of conquest 1 population

tory, stre

hes of the Itaquai River have not yet been

sible parts of the Amazon, where gold and oil, rubber and

disea once in the millions, is now roughly 350

fastation

OC including a ontacted tribes like the Flecheiros

the Arrow People

BY SCOTT WALLACE

zing of a machete and the shrill cries of screaming piha birds high in the canopy overhead. Our col- umn of 34 men proceeds in silence, strung out sin- gle file far back into the forest. Only one or two companions are visible at any time in the blur of electric greens and rain-soaked browns. The rest are swallowed from view by a spray of overhanging branches and vines as thick as anacondas dangling

6 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

sontewhieret in the distance, delta toe by the eal

Leading expeditions with missionary zeal, Sydney Possuelo, tight center, is driven by a gospel of his own: “I don’t need to know what language the Flecheiros speak or what gods they worship. | just want to protect them.”

THE KANAMARI INDIANS ALL AGREED ON THIS: THE FLECHEIROS ARE

DANGEROUS—“UNTAMED.”

To help achieve Possuelo’s long-term goal—discovering where the Flecheiros live so authorities can more effectively keep out intruders—the 34-man crew first takes care of short-term essentials. Stop- ping along the Itaquai River to hunt for dinner, they bag a load of peccary (above). When their boats bottom out upstream, the team members pack their gear and slog along on foot (top left). Some Indians on the trek treat their eyes with a tradi- tional potion applied with palm leaves (middle). Brutally painful, the drug alters vision, giving the jungle’s dense green walls greater texture and dimension—and making it easier to spot a woolly monkey (bottom) for a quick meal.

a hundred feet from the treetops to the forest floor. Just ahead of me, Sydney Possuelo strides double-time across a stretch of level ground, a welcome break from the steep hillsides we've been scrambling over for days. “We're probably the only ones who have ever walked here,” he tells me. “Us and the Indians.”

A cantankerous iconoclast with bulging hazel eyes, scraggly salt-and-pepper beard, and wild locks flowing from beneath a floppy cam- ouflage jungle hat, Possuelo, 63, is widely con- sidered one of the Amazons last great wilderness scouts and the leading authority on Brazil’s remaining pockets of isolated Indians. After two weeks of river travel and 20 days of steady bush- whacking, Possuelo has led us into one of the most remote and uncharted places left on the planet, near the headwaters of two adjacent

rivers, the Itaquai and the Jutai. This is the land of the mysterious Flecheiros, or Arrow People, a rarely glimpsed Indian tribe known principally as deft archers disposed to unleashing poison- tipped projectiles to defend their territory against all intruders, then melting away into the forest.

Suddenly Possuelo stops in his tracks. A freshly hacked sapling, still dangling by a shred of bark, lies across the path in front of us. In itself, the makeshift gate could not halt a toddler, much less a column of nearly three dozen armed men. But still, it bears a message—and a warning— that Possuelo instantly recognizes and respects.

“This is universal language in the jungle,” he whispers. “It means “Stay Out. Go No Farther. We must be getting close to their village.”

Which is something Possuelo wants to avoid. He wheels around and with a silent, dramatic

INTO THE AMAZON 9

Pera

wave directs our column to veer off the path into the dense undergrowth on our flanks. A half hour later, after slogging through boot-sucking mud and dodging branches that swarm with fire ants, we arrive by the steep banks of a clear, nar- row creek, where Possuelo orders a halt to the march while we wait for stragglers to catch up.

The Flecheiros figure among 17 so-called uncontacted tribes living in the far recesses of the Brazilian Amazon. In this part of the rain forest, the Vale do Javari Indigenous Area, there may be as many as 1,350 uncontacted indige- nous people—perhaps the largest such concen- tration anywhere in the world. Most of them are descendants of the survivors of massacres per- petrated by white intruders over the centuries. The Indians then scattered into the rugged folds of the region’s headwaters and continue to shun contact with the outside world.

But violent clashes account for only a fraction of the deaths suffered by native communities at the hands of outsiders. Most died from epidemic diseases, including the common cold, for which they had no biological defenses. Ivan Arapa, one of our scouts, is from the Matis tribe, who were first contacted by the outside world about 25

10 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

years ago. Ivan still remembers the wholesale death that accompanied these very first visits of Brazilian government officials to his village.

“Everyone was coughing, everyone was dying,” he recalls. “Many, many Matis died. We didn’t know why.”

More than half of the 350 Matis living along the Itui River inside the Javari reserve perished in the months following contact, officials say.

IT’S A DISMAL STORY THAT'S become all too familiar to Possuelo during his 40-year career as a sertanista, a uniquely Brazilian profession that folds all the skills and passions of a frontiersman, ethnographer, adventurer, and Indian rights activist into a sin- gle, eclectic vocation. That's why our mission is not to make contact with the Flecheiros but rather to gather information on the extent of their territory's boundaries, information Pos- suelo will use to bolster his efforts to protect their lands. In other respects, the Flecheiros are to remain, in large measure, a mystery.

As we passed through squalid Kanamari Indian settlements on our way up the Itaquai River a month earlier, villagers gave vague,

contradictory tales of the Flecheiros—third- or fourth-hand accounts, translated in halting Portuguese, of sightings of the Indians and clashes between them and logging crews that once operated in the area. Some said the Flecheiros are tall and muscular with long, flowing hair. Others told us they paint their faces and bodies red and clip their hair in a classic bowl shape common to many Amazon tribes. But the Kanamari all agreed on this: The Flecheiros are dangerous, “untamed,” they said, and villagers carefully steered clear of Flecheiros lands upriver. “We don’t go there,” said a Kanamari man we met one afternoon as he paddled a small dugout in the honey-colored waters. “There are indios bra- vos, wild Indians, up there. That’s their territory.”

These are stories Possuelo actually likes to hear. In his encounters with the Kanamari he actively nourishes an image of the Flecheiros as a deadly peril to be avoided. “I prefer them like this—violent,” Possuelo says. Isolated tribes

willing to kill intruders to defend their lands, or

that have a reputation for doing so, make the most tenacious guardians of the pristine forest.

Beginning at an outpost south of Tabatinga, Possuelo’s thousand-mile trek traverses a swath of the Vale do Javari Indigenous Area (map), nominally a safe haven for roughly 3,900 Indians. The sanctuary's southeastern flank, however, is barely monitored, leaving uncontacted tribes vulnerable to encroach- ment by non-natives. Possuelo’s trackers re- lied on small tips—footprints, a chewed wad

of sugarcane, a snapped sapling (below)—to locate the Flecheiros without making contact

“THIS IS UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE IN THE JUNGLE,’ possucLo

WHISPERS. “

T MEANS ‘STAY OUT. GO NO FARTHER.’ WE MU

GETTING CLOSE TO THEIR VILLAGE.”

At the same time, isolation offers groups like the Flecheiros the best hope for maintaining their cultural vibrancy, even their very survival. This interplay between ecological preservation and the protection of uncontacted tribes lies at the heart of Possuelo’s work. “In protecting the iso

lated Indian, you are also protecting millions of hectares of biodiversity,” he says.

During the past few days we've found signs of the Flecheiros everywhere: crude blazes hacked into tree trunks, decaying old lean-tos, overgrown footpaths. All bear witness to an iso- lated, semi-nomadic people still living beyond the reach of our “civilized” world in a distant, virtually Neolithic past. Yesterday afternoon we broke through dense underbrush into a sunlit clearing to behold a cluster of low-lying palm-roofed huts that looked more like hobbit dwellings than shelters for full-grown human

beings. It appeared to be an abandoned fishing camp. Two tapir jawbones, still filled with teeth, were slung from a small tree, some kind of totem, Possuelo surmised. A cone-shaped cage fashioned from sticks gouged into the ground sat nearby. Alongside it lay a perfectly round, soot-blackened clay pot. “These Indians are very close to the way Amerigo Vespucci would have found them,” Possuelo said with a touch of mar- vel and admiration in his voice. “They live by hunting, fishing, and gathering.”

Most of the vestiges we have found are days, weeks, even months old—far enough away in time to presume a relative margin of safety in distance between the Flecheiros and our expe dition. An experienced tracker like Possuelo can observe such signs and instantly date them. The fishing camp, Possuelo figured, was from the previous dry season, the time of year when

INTO THE AMAZON 11

Tepi was born roughly 25 years ago, about the time when his tribe, the Matis, was first contacted by outsiders. Although he has visited Brazil's urban jungles, he now embraces the traditions of his own, including tattoos, and nose and ear ornaments. “The Indians are very serene,” says Possuelo, who hired Tepi®”- as a hunter and tracker. “They think white people talk too much.”

floodwaters draw back from the forest floor, and animals as well as humans move toward the Amazon’s larger rivers and streams in a pri- mordial quest for food and wat

But shortly after we departed the camp, our scouts came upon fresh signs of the Flecheiros, a piece of coiled vine and a chunk of masti- cated sugarcane left on the path. “These are from right now!” Ivan Arapa whispered excitedly. Just ahead we found fresh footprints. Possuelo read the skid marks left in the mud and said: “He saw us and took off running.” He raised his hand for silence and sent word for all to maintain visual contact with one another along our single column that stretched far back into the forest. For the first time since our journey began, Possuelo strapped on his pistol.

Minutes later, our trailblazers glimpsed a pair

14 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

of naked Indians as they dashed across a log footbridge and vanished into closed jungle on the far side of the river. Possuelo tried to reas sure them of our peaceful intent, calling out into the forest: “Whooo! Whooo!” Only the forlorn cry of the screaming piha replied.

And last night, another first: Possuelo posted sentries to keep vigil as we slept fitfully in our hammocks, straining our ears above an eerie, reverberating chorus of frogs for any snapping of twigs or rustling of leaves that could signal an approach by the Flecheiros. As we got under

way this morning, Possuelo ordered the men to leave behind a machete and a knife as a peace offering. Does Possuelo suppose the Flecheiros will subject our campsite to the

same sort of forensic scrutiny we have brought to bear on the

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE OUR JOURNEY BEGAN, POSSUELO STRAPPED

ON HIS PISTOL.

Fresh footprints, maybe 15 minutes old (top right), indicate that the Flecheiros are nearby. Are they preparing to attack? That

danger doesn't dampen the curiosity of

two team members. Ignoring Possuelo’s first commandment—thou shalt not make contact—the pair sneaks away to explore the area and stumbles upon an empty Flecheiros village. They find and later try on ceremonial masks made from long strips of tree bark (above), and discover pots with curare, a poison put on arrows and darts. Turning up only one weapon— a broken blowgun and dart (middle)— Possuelo's men keep their eyes open and rifles ready (right). Perhaps dozens of Fle- cheiros live here. Where have they gone?

“Com certeza,” he replies. “You can bet on it.” What might they be thinking about us? He looks me straight in the eye and answers with an edge of foreboding. “I imagine they're thinking that their enemies have arrived.”

NOW, HAVING

detoured around the strange Flecheiros roadblock, the men reach the embankment in groups of three and four, stag- gering under the weight of their backpacks overstuffed with provisions, collapsing around us on the damp forest floor. Among us there are a dozen Matis Indians, six Kana- mari, two Marubo, and the rest mostly non-Indian frontiers- men. We guzzle water straight from the stream, but as the minutes wear on and Possuelo takes a head count he realizes that two of our Kanamari porters are missing. Laughter gives way to a tense silence. Possuelo paces back and forth, stealing glances at his wristwatch with a scowl. Though it’s approach- ing midday and we're only a few degrees off the Equator, I’ve begun to shiver in my sweat- drenched fatigues.

“Damn it!” Possuelo snarls. “These guys are holding us up! A total lack of discipline!” With that, he dispatches a half dozen Matis to look for the stragglers. But when the Matis fail to return, an unspoken dread slowly creeps over all of us. Have our missing companions been captured, perhaps even killed, by the Flecheiros?

This certainly isn’t the first potentially life- threatening crisis Possuelo has faced in his career. He was once held hostage by Kayapé warriors and on another occasion was pistol- whipped by white settlers seeking to invade Indian lands. He’s had malaria 38 times and has received as many death threats. In the early 1990s as president of FUNAI, the Brazilian govern- ment agency that deals with indigenous peoples, Possuelo squared off with army generals,

influential politicians, and a violent rabble of

gold prospectors to win protection for the

16 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

homelands of the Yanomami Indians, on Bra- zil’s northern border with Venezuela. A few years ago Possuelo yanked 22 men on a FUNAI expedition by helicopter from the Peruvian border after they were surrounded by hostile, isolated Indians. This time he has assembled a large, well-armed contingent; the Flecheiros would have to think twice before attacking such a numerous force. But Possuelo has issued stand- ing orders: If we are attacked, the men are only to fire warning shots in the air.

From the very moment I met Possuelo, I found him to be a man of boundless energy. Photographer Nicolas Reynard and I had joined him aboard the Waika, one of four vintage Amazonian steamers that was hauling us up- stream toward the Itaquai’s headwaters. He barked orders to the men while amiably field- ing my questions without skipping a beat. Once we left the boats behind, we would spend nearly a month marching straight through the heart of unknown territory, he told me that first night. Eventually we would build our own dug- out canoes to navigate down the Jutai and back to civilization.

Our route would take us through the

Bloated and beginning to decompose, an anaconda emits an awful stench on the banks of the Curuena River but offers few clues about who killed it. Another local puzzle: How to evict a handful of non-Indian settlers who illegally remain in the Javari reserve Possuelo wants the settlers out, but his crit- ics say development of the Amazon Basin is as natural as a downpour in the rain forest (below)—and almost as inevitable

£ Jose

ISOLATED TRIBES WILLING TO KILL INTRUDERS TO DEFEND THEIR LANDS MAKE THE MOST TENACIOUS

GUARDIANS ©F THE PRISTINE FOREST.

southernmost reaches of the Javari reserve, a vast wilderness area set aside by FUNAI in 1996, the year government agents under Possuelo’s command expelled all non-Indian settlers and loggers from the territory. Picture the southern half of Florida, roughly the same size as the reserve, in pre-Columbian times: not a single road, a mere 3,900 inhabitants spread out over an enormous expanse of steamy woodlands, swamps, and alligator-infested rivers.

In fact, southern Florida 500 years ago hosted a much larger population than that, and ethnologists say it’s certain the Javari drainage itself once did too. Archaeologists estimate that millions of indigenous people occupied the Brazilian Amazon at the beginning of the 16th century. Today there are some 350,000 in all of Brazil, including isolated groups like the Fle- cheiros whose numbers, along with many other

things about them, are a matter of guesswork.

Not even Possuelo knows what language the Flecheiros speak, what their ethnicity is, or even what they call themselves. “It’s not important to know any of that to protect them,” he says. And anyway, it would be impossible to glean such information without exposing the Indians to deadly disease or a host of competing values that could erase their traditions. “Once you make contact, you begin the process of destroying their universe.”

Possuelo didn’t always think this way. Like other sertanistas, he once thrived on the excite- ment of contacting “wild” Indians. A FUNAI scout’s professional reputation was built largely on how many first contacts he had notched. In all, Possuelo has been credited with seven since the 1970s. But in the course of making those contacts, Possuelo became disillusioned. The

INTO THE AMAZON 17

“YOU WERE BORN AGAIN TODAY, BECAUSE THE FLECHEIROS COULD HAVE KILLED

YOU,” POSSUELO SCOLDS.

ens \ ig

Their mission accomplished, Possuelo and company build their own canoes

to carry them home. Using axes and machetes, they fell two large trees, then strip the bark off each trunk (top left). Drilling an array of shallow holes on the bottom of a log (middle) guides work on the top side; the men hollow out the wood until they hit the holes, which ensures the canoe’s hull has a uniform thickness. Later the holes are plugged. Roasting the hull over a fire (above) makes the wood malleable, enabling workers to pry the hull open wider— then jam wooden slats inside. Two weeks later the canoe is river ready (left), and the team is primed to push on.

Indians began to visit the rough-and-tumble frontier towns, started drinking, and lost all sense of who they were. To meet new needs and wants

created by the dominant white society, such as clothing, medicine, and consumer goods, they began selling off timber, despoiling their land in the pro

Possuelo eventually came to see contact as the undoing of once proud indigenous societies. “The curiosity I once had about uncontacted people has been subordinated by something else—the imperative to protect them.”

Possuelo’s last contact with an isolated tribe came with a group of Korubo in 1996, also with- in the bounds of the Javari reserve (see page 24). But he undertook that initiative, he says, only to save the Korubo from increasingly violent clashes with logging crews. This position has

placed Possuelo at loggerheads with a broad ar- ray of adversaries, including missionaries who, he says, have accused him of playing God with the Indians while shielding them from pastoral efforts to spread the Gospel and the word of everlasting life.

BUT NOW OUR OWN LIVES

are at stake. Possuelo dispatches a second team, a dozen fully armed scouts, to look for the Kanamari and the r arch part

One of our scouts finally returns with disqu

eting news. The tracks of our missing compan- ions led straight past the Flecheiros gate—the broken sapling on the trail—then followed the path through a huge garden of cultivated manioc and plantains and into the clearing of a large Flecheiros settlement, about 14 huts in all.

INTO THE AMAZON 19

“I'm not proposing we should all get naked and be Neandertal

says Possuelo, at left, paddling down the Jutai River and ainst the popular tide.

“But we can live a simpler life—one that might take us away from a materialism that destroys our air, our water, and each other.”

Long hidden from modernity’s gaze, a man from the Tsohom Djapa tribe (below) was first contacted three years ago by Kanamari Indians, who are believed to have lured some members of the Tsohom Djapa into servitude. Collisions with outsiders have been cata- strophic for isolated peoples, says Possuelo, who sees gold dredges bordering Indian lands (right) as yet another shadow ahead. “Uncontacted Indians live in a lost paradise,” he says. “I'm just giving them some time.”

POSSUELO IS SURE THAT ONCE YOU MAKE CONTAC WITH THE INDIANS, YOU BEGIN THE PROCESS OF

DESTROYING THEIR UNIVERS

The Flecheiros themselves had fled into the sur- rounding jungle, leaving behind prodigious heaps of smoked meats—monkey, tapir, turtle. and smoldering campfires.

“It’s their system of security,” Possuelo nods gravely. “They scatter into the forest.”

The Flecheiros seemed to have been prepar- ing for a feast, the scout reports. In the middle of the village, the scouts found several ceremo- nial masks made from long strands of bark, alongside ceramic vats filled with red uructi dye used to decorate faces and bodies. More omi- nously, the Indians took all of their weapons with them when they fled. But they left behind a sharp bamboo arrowpoint and the broken end of a blowgun, which the scout now holds aloft for all to see.

We thus learn for the first time that the Flecheiros have other weapons besides the bow

22 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

and arrow. And they also left two large clay pots brimming with curare, the dark poisonous goop that they apply to their arrow tips. Most dis- turbing of all, the Kanamari’s footprints van- ished without a trace down a path on the far side of the village.

Now Ivan Arapa silently demonstrates, cov- ering his mouth with one hand and drawing an imaginary vine around his neck with the other, how the Flecheiros could have jumped our com- panions from behind, gagging them and yank- ing them off their feet into the undergrowth,

“T'd say they’ve been taken by the Indians,” Possuelo says. “Now we have to get out of here. Maybe the Indians will let them go.” He looks out into the shadowy forest surrounding us. “But we can't wait for them here,” he adds. “We're go- ing to march to a more advantageous position. We'll camp by the river and see if they show up.”

By now both search parties have come back, leaving only the two Kanamari unaccounted for. One of our lead scouts reports seeing footprints that match the Kanamari’s rubber-soled sneak- ers farther ahead, spaced out in long intervals that would suggest the strides of men in pan- icked flight. Possuelo dispatches Soldado, his most dependable scout, with orders to overtake our fleeing companions and, if necessary, fire into the air to summon them.

Possuelo clamps his hands together as if beseeching God. But it is still another hour before Soldado and the two wayward Kanamari appear at the edge of the riverside clearing where we are preparing our campsite. The Kanamari bow their heads contritely as Possuelo glowers at them. But clearly he is more relieved than angry at the men.

It seems the two Kanamari thought the Fle- cheiros might be long-lost relatives separated from the main riverside settlements decades ago. They admit they ignored Possuelo’s orders and ventured off to satisfy their curiosity. But fear washed over them when they got to the far side of the village. They leaped off the trail and took off running. Not until they heard the report of

Soldado’s rifle did they realize they were not being chased by the Flecheiros.

Possuelo seizes the occasion to call a kind of political pep rally around the campfire. “I'd say to our two Kanamari friends: You were born again today, because the Flecheiros could have killed you,” he mildly scolds. “We're not here to get to know them. We're here to find out if the Flecheiros use this land.”

Possuelo then reminds the Indians of the extraordinary things they saw today. Their incursion into the Flecheiros village amounted to a flagrant violation of Possuelo’s policy to avoid making contact. None- theless, he is clearly elated by what he has learned from the unlikely visit.

“Here the Flecheiros live well,” he says in slow, simple Portuguese, making sure his words sink in. “You could see it in their village. They hunt, they fish, and they grow food. They must be very healthy. Their babies must be fat; their mothers proba- bly have lots of milk. They have parties. They are happy.”

The last traces of daylight have faded from the sky, plunging the jungle into darkness. Luminescent moths zip through the trees over- head, and the nighttime chorus of trilling insects and croaking frogs has begun.

“The work we are doing here is beautiful, because they don’t even know we're here to help them,” Possuelo says. “We have to respect their way of life. We're not going to pursue them.

The best thing we can WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE

do is to stay out of Experience the Sights &

their lives.” Sounds of the Flecheiros

Possuelo pauses to stare into the flames expedition, then view images

of the campfire.“Now | of first contact with the we're going to con- | Korubo people. Join our tinue our work and Forum and share your our journey,” he says. thoughts on the future of “We're all going to get | isolated tribes at national out of here alive.” geographic.com/0308.

INTO THE AMAZON 23

AL

fe) tela HOSTILE TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD, A BAND OF KORUBO— KNOWN LOCALLY AS THE HEAD BASHERS— ACCEPTED PEACEFUL CONTACT BEETS WHAT'S HAPPENED TO THEM SINCE?

Only five days after first being contacted by a team from FUNAL, the Brazilian government’s Indian agency, a Korubo hunter named Takpan is all smiles as he shows off the carcass of a paca, prized game in the Amazon. Ten months later, however, the same hunter would slay one of the FUNAI team’s most experienced hands. The attack came in the traditional Korubo way, by surprising the victim with a skull-crunching blow from a heavy club.

Following the assault by Takpan, the Korubo

vanished into the jungle for four months. When the band reappeared, a FUNAI worker who

had witnessed the killing asked for an expla- nation. “What killing? We didn’t kill anyone,” Takpan replied, Had it been a ritual slaying?

Did the victim commit some offense? Even now the reasons for the killing remain enigmatic. Only threads of Korubo history are known: Sometime in the early 1990s a band of about 20 Korubo split from a tribe of several hundred living deeper in the forest, forcing the splinter

group closer to “white man” territory. Sub sequent skirmishes between the band and set- ers and loggers prompted FUNAI to intervene, despite the government's official hands-off poli- cy toward uncontacted peoples. Today the Ko- rubo regularly visit a nearby post for medicine and to report trespassing by outsiders into the Vale do Javari Indigenous Area where they live. In four encounters, the Korubo have chosen to fight before reporting. Three interlopers have been killed and three others wounded.

INTO THE AMAZON 25

On one of his periodic visits FUNAI expedition leader Sydney Possuelo (above) checks in with the Korubo band he first contacted in 1996.

Phe band’s number has remained constant since then. The only deaths have been those of children: An anaconda attacked one youngster while the group was bathing, and there have been three infanticides, a not uncommon prac- tice among Amazonian tribes. Korubo mothers speak openly of the babies, who were all female, but do not say how or why they were killed—

26 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

another Korubo mystery. The band inhabits a large range, dividing time among their molocas, or communal shelters, which serve as bases for hunting, fishing, and farming of manioc, plantains, and maize. Both men and women paint their bodies with a red dye made from the seeds of the uructi tree, But outsiders know little about Korubo social structure or beliefs— which is just fine with Possuelo if it helps protect the band’s isolation. 0

Valerie A, May, Senior Editor

Linked by trust and curiosity, Possuelo and a woman named Maya share a joyful moment (below).

A dispute involving Maya may have been the reason

why these Korubo broke from the larger tribe. Regular visits by FUNAI workers such as Antonio de Souza Olivera (below left), who admin- isters antimalaria medicine to a child, are part of a strategy of limited interaction that seems to be working well for the Korubo—for now.

bohemian

By Cathy Newman

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SENIOR WRITER

Photographs by William Albert Allard

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER,

rhapsody

on the right bank of re i <

history and hip embrace in the marais

1F A POLICEMAN EVER ARRESTS HER and tries to confiscate her barrel organ (as happened to a fellow street musician), Dominique Alavoine knows exactly what to do.

“Pll tie myself to it first,” she says, her dark eyes flashing.

The coast is clear this afternoon, so Domi- nique, who is thin, angular, and has the hollow- eyed look of an Edith Piaf, begins pealing out “Lili Marlene” under the arcades of the Place des Vosges, a 17th-century square of perfect sym- metry in the heart of the Marais.

The Marais, a 310-acre triangular slice of Paris on the Right Bank of the Seine, is a kind of outdoor cabaret, anyway. The narrow, vibrant streets of this neighborhood make a perfect stage for Dominique and her music.

DOMINIQUE ALAVOINE MEETS HER PUBLIC

“You can reach people through a song,” she says. “You create a rapport; it’s almost angelic.”

After playing in front of the Place des Vosges, she wheels her barrel organ down the Rue St. Antoine and wrestles it up the steps leading to the plaza in front of the Church of St. Gervais— St. Protais. Slipping the punch cards of a tune into the organ, she turns the crank and plays “When I’m Sixty-four,” singing in a clear soprano in French-inflected English.

When I get older losing my hair,

Many years from now.

An old woman, her hair twisted in a pewter bun, opens her heavy wooden shutters three sto- ries up, peers down, and sways to the music.

Will you still be sending me a valentine,

Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?

29

Graceful geometry of the Place des Vosges is the legacy of Henry IV, who envisioned a pub- lic space lined by shops and homes, “It’s a little mel- ancholy with the noise and crowds,” says resident Claude de Muzac, whose apartment faces the 17th- century square. “Even so, when it has rained and the grass glistens, it’s magic.”

place des vOSges

all |

a a |

A sun shower bathes the Rue

de Rivoli in light the color of pale champagne. The Marais—a fable of a neighborhood’s rise and fall and rise—was chic in the 17th century, declined into slum in the 19th, then turned newly chic in the late 20th.

rue de rivoli

A door to an apartment next to the church swings open; two men emerge, bottles in hand, and pass glasses of Chablis around. Early after- noon strollers cluster around the barrel organ, gratefully accept, and begin sipping. It is as if the music unlocks something in each person’s soul, opening them to the world and to others.

“This is how I met the man in my life,” Domi- nique says. “He came every day to listen to me play. I found I could talk to him about anything.” He was, it turned out, a musician as well.

“Life is full of surprises,” she says in a tone of

wonder. “No, not a surprise.” She smiles. “It was the magic of the street.”

Perhaps I should get a barrel organ myself, ayed by the romance of the story. ys Dominique, motioning me to her side. “Would you like to try?”

She inserts a roll of music in the organ, and, as I crank the handle, wavering notes shape them- selves into “Some Day My Prince Will Come.”

n the Marais enchantment seeps up from the cobblestones, wraps around the wrought iron lampposts, suffuses the narrow alleys. You walk down a street, and a vendor con-

jures a bouquet of pink roses. Behind the stiff

facade of a 17th-century building lies a garden

34 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

in the Picasso Museum, housed in a restored 17th-century man- sion. In 1965 the French government passed a law making the Marais a his- toric district, thus preserving mansions once on the edge of decay.

drenched in the fragrance of lilacs. Then there is the Place des Vosges—with nine nearly iden- tical mansions on each of the four sides, except for the grander King’s and Queen’s Pavilions, which anchor the southern and northern sides. In the soft morning light, the brick blushes faint pink. Linden trees pruned into a perfect geom- etry border a garden, which stands as the cen- terpiece of the square. Lovers lie on the grass, entangled in each other’s arms. Why shouldn't a prince appear?

The history of the Marais (which translates as the “marsh”) is a riches-to-rags-to-riches fable that began in the 1600s when Henry IV built the Place des Vosges, making it the most fashion- able address in the realm. Almost two centuries later it started a gradual descent into slum, serv- ing also as the Jewish ghetto (by custom, rather than law). Only recently has it emerged from the grime to become, if not the highest rent district in Paris, then certainly one of the most chic

i Ce Ea street S ye c > scene The neighborhood’s haphazard web of narrow streets includes those that still follow

their medieval courses.

Sa 8

Tey 2)

Y

ILLUSTRATION: DOMINIQUE OU! on mo GUIDES GALLIMARD PARIS, EDITIONS NOUVEAUX LOISIRS, FRANCE Om 100

addresses in this capital of chic. Call such trans- formation magic if you will. Better yet, shrug as the French do and accept it as part of the ineffable sweetness of life.

There is a grandeur to parts of the Marais, with its 17th-century mansions built when the quarter was ultrafashionable, but on the whole the Marais is not grand. There are more extrav- agant neighborhoods in Paris: the 16th, for example, a tony arrondissement, or district, of art nouveau and art deco apartments, where the

Within 40 steps you Pass a synagogue, a kosher butcher, two gay bars, and an Internet café.

women carry quilted Chanel bags, shop for their clothes in Franck & Fils, and dress their children in navy blue and bottle green.

The Marais—which incorporates most of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements of Paris—is not at all like that. In fact, once you cross the Rue de Bretagne into the northern apex of the Marais triangle, the neighborhood turns quiet and ever so slightly frayed.

The Marais—chic and not-so-chic sections

36 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

alike—is quirky. The 16th- and 17th-century buildings lean over the streets as if slightly tipsy; narrow lanes turn and twist and bear strange names like Rue du Pont aux Choux (the Street of the Bridge of Cabbages) or Rue des Mauvais Garcons (the Street of Bad Boys), named after the criminals who lived there in the 14th century. The Marais, says Jacob Berger, a film director who lives and works in the neighbor- hood, is de guingois—that is to say, slightly askew. Many who live there are too.

Meet Fabien Douillard, professional dandy, who, one morning after watching the film Titanic, arose and decided he was not of this cen- tury. Subsequently, he began to sleep in a grand lit a baldaquin, or four-poster bed. He wakes each morning to the baroque strains of the 17th- century composer Lully and dresses in tailcoat and top hat. Then he heads to one of the more elegant tearooms in Paris, Mariage Fréres, where he sits writing poetry in a book of vellum leaves bound in brocade. Sometimes he works a day job in a shop that specializes in the restoration of antique textiles. If the truth be known, he also owns a television set kept hidden in an antique cupboard. But for the most part he lives his dreams of centuries past.

“How will we recognize you?” my interpreter,

1 gene > brides like Melanie Hadjadj have been mar- ried in the Synagogue des Tournelles. Bouquets of sorrow at 6-10 Rue des Hospitaliéres—St. Gervais commemo- rates the 165 students of a Jewish school who were deported and murdered during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Elisabeth, asks when phoning to set up the interview, as if there might possibly be more than one man in top hat and tails lunching in Mariage Fréres.

“T'll be the one with the ostrich fan,” he replies.

3 a street in the Marais and you f cross centuries and cultures. Such my is the richness of the neighborhood

~ that within 40 steps on the Rue des Ecouffes, you pass a synagogue, a kosher butcher, two gay bars, and an Internet café, The Rue des Ecouffes dead-ends into the Rue des Rosiers, the spine of the Jewish quarter, where you find restaurants that sell kosher pizza, kosher Chinese food, and kosher sushi—prepared, a notice on the door proclaims, according to strict supervisory laws. There are posters trumpeting a cross-dressers’ ball and a performance by

Madame H. (who is really a satirist in drag named Christophe) at the Point Virgule, a small theater. In the Marais, cultures, sometimes even genders, blur: It’s strictly live and let live.

But at Jo Goldenberg’s, Korcarz, or any of the other Jewish bakeries or delicatessens, tradition rules. There is strudel with apples, cinnamon, and nuts; cheesecake dense with raisins, cherries, or strawberries; poppy seed cake, bagels twisted like a wreath and dusted with sesame seeds, Russian bread dark as molasses, borscht, pick- led herring, and more, much more.

“People come here to taste their roots,” says Florence Finkelsztajn, who runs a bakery at 19 Rue des Rosiers. But there’s more to it than just cheesecake, she points out. It has to do with making connections. “The Jewish community lives split up, so it’s important to have a place to meet,” she says, referring to the movement of most of the Jewish population to outlying arrondissements and the suburbs in the dec- ades following World War II. It also has to do with celebration. “We cater for all occasions of happiness—marriages, bar mitzvahs, brisses.” It has to do with continuity. “Our customers stay with us from generation to generation.”

Do not confuse the Finkelsztajn’s at 19 Rue des Rosiers, owned by Florence, with the

MARAIS 37

A flash flood of tourists and locals streams down the Rue Ste. Croix de la Bretonnerie in pursuit of life, lib- erty, and a good time. In the toler- ant Marais, races, cultures, and genders mix and match. Laissez- faire prevails: There is some- thing—and some- one—for everyone.

rue ste. croix de la bretonnerie

Finkelsztajn’s at 27 Rue des Rosiers, owned by Florence’s ex-husband, Sacha. Florence Fin- kelsztajn’s, which has a blue mosaic front, is closed on Tuesdays. Sacha Finkelsztajn’s, which has a yellow painted front and awning, is closed on Wednesdays. In a kind of friendly rivalry, both sell pastries and savories like grandmother

used to make. Which of the bakeries has better strude “Here,” Florence says, setting a plate in front of me. “

(ou decide.”

n the Marais, along with sweetness, there is bitterness too deep for words. The his- tory of its Jewish community, which dates from the 13th century, is a litany of forced dispersals, including a great, forced expulsion in 1394, The community virtually disappeared and would not be reborn until the 19th cen- tury, when large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews immigrated to Paris from central Europe. (In the 1960s an influx of Sephardic Jews from North Africa arrived, adding their cultural influence to the mix. Today in the Jewish Marais a mixed marriage is not the joining of Christian and Jew, but rather the pairing of Sephardic bride and Ashkenazi groom.) The darkest night was yet to come. On June

40 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

14, 1940, the Nazis occupied Paris. “I was two years old when my father was deported to the death camps,” says Lina Zajac-Dratkowski. “Though it was more than half a century ago, the pain gets worse as I get older.”

She is sparrowlike, now 62, and fierce. “I can’t forgive; to forget is impossible,” she says. “My uncle, my aunts, my cousins, my father— all lost.”

I murmur something about the horrors of the Nazi occupiers and the random nature of the deportations.

“It’s not the Germans who came and took

him,” she says sharply. She’s referring to France’s wartime Vichy government, which rounded up and sent 76,000 Jews to French transit camps before shipping them to Auschwitz and other German concentration camps. “My mother was

philosophical. She used to say: “This country accepted us; we must respect it?”

Lina opens her purse, pulls out a wallet, and extracts a small square photograph, darkened with age.

“This is all I know of my father,” she says, handing me a photo of a young man with round brown eyes and a look of innocence.

“I never watch documentaries about the war,” she says quietly. “I’m terrified I'll see my

Passions dwell in shadows in the Bistro Latin (left), a dance hall on the Rue du Temple, and in Les Scanda- leuses, a lesbian bar on the Rue des Rosiers. As bars, boutiques, and other beacons of the trendy increase, so does regret. “This was a village,” said a resi- dent. “Now it’s deformed by money.”

father on the deportation train or as one of the skeletons.

“No,” she repeats, lips drawn into a thin line, “T haven't seen the films. I know how they end.”

oday the Marais teaches tolerance. “The

Marais opens minds,” Hervé Lourau, a

judge, tells me over a drink. Lourau, who

lives on the outskirts of Paris, comes to the Marais to socialize. “Here gay life is so open. People come and decide ‘they’ aren’t monsters, after all.”

Lourau credits the gay community with gen- erating much of the energy and style that have made today’s Marais a trendy place.

“T hate to be a gay imperialist,” he says, “but gays are always ahead of the fashion curve; that’s how the Marais became fashionable.” He sur- veys the room. “Some people come with their

families, sit in a gay bar, look around, and suddenly realize there are a lot of boys. Of course,” he adds, “some people never notice anything. They don’t get it.”

In the Marais there are 370 gay businesses, according to Jean Francois Chassagne, president of the Syndicat National des Entreprises Gaies, an association of gay businesses.

“The Marais is the shop window for the gay community,” says Chassagne, a resident of the quarter. There are gay restaurants like Le Gai Moulin. There are cruising clubs for gay men like Le Dép6t. There is Le Gay Choc, a bakery, where one can order loaves of bread in, shall we say, unusual shapes. There are gay bars like Le Cox, the Bear’s Den, Amnesia, and the lesbian bar Les Scandaleuses, and many of these enter- prises fly the rainbow flag of gay pride.

Does the flag signify that only gays are wel- comed and others not? I ask.

“Mais, non,” Chassagne tells me. “We're not heterophobic.”

The Marais wasn’t always ahead of the curve. By the end of the French Revolution it had fallen behind. The path to faded glory began in 1682 when Louis XIV moved the court from

Paris to Versailles, ten miles west of the city lim- its. In the following decades nobility drifted away

MARAIS 41

from the Marais and toward the west side of Paris, nearer the focal point of power. The Marais became, said Louis-Sébastien Mercier, an 18th- century writer, “the refuge of families in decline.”

As the wealthy moved out, industry moved in. The area became a place of small manufac- turers, workshops, and craftsmen, who set up shop in the courtyards of dilapidated mansions.

By 1950 the Marais had more substandard housing than any other part of Paris. The whiff of urban decay floated through the quarter. A third of the buildings lacked running water. Two-thirds of the units lacked private toilets.

“In the 1960s a friend asked a taxi at Orly Airport to take her to the Place des Vosges. The driver said: ‘Where is that?’” recalled historian Alexandre Gady, author of a guidebook about the Marais. If near oblivion wasn’t bad enough, the Marais became a junkyard. “Developers broke into houses and grabbed architectural ele- ments—woodwork, wrought iron—whatever they could cart away.”

In 1965 the French government tucked the Marais under its wing and protected it under a law that proclaimed it a historic neighborhood.

In the classic scenario, developers moved in, rents soared, craftsmen and longtime residents were forced out. Renovation revived the area and launched the Era of Exposed Beams. The Ma- rais became smart and perhaps a little too slick.

A neighborhood bakery became a glitzy

The Marais, says a film director, is de guingois, slightly askew. Many who live there are too.

shoe store. The butcher is now a fashion shop. The old Jewish bathhouse, or hammam, nearly became a McDonald’s—the developers even pledged to sell kosher hamburgers—until pro- testers quashed the move. Stores patronized by women wearing fashionably frayed jeans, impossibly high heels, and bored looks sell lava lamps, African baskets, and batik skirts.

“You walk along the street; you see shirt, shirt, dress, dress,” says Thérése Bernardac, who owns the antiques shop Les Deux Orphelines in the Place des Vosges with her son, Edouard.

Do you feel like a dinosaur? I ask.

“Yes,” she sighs, looking around the shop

42 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

crowded with old porcelain and furniture. “It turns out we are the antiques.”

“Sundays are the worst,” she adds. “You have to cleave your way through tourists.”

“Without tourists and their credit cards, busi- ness in your store might languish,” I counter.

She lifts an eyebrow. “You can’t have every- thing,” she says with a faint smile. “But you can have regrets.” el magine a dusting of magic has fallen our way. A genie (with a Gauloise cigarette dan- gling from his lips) grants us a wish. We wish for an apartment in the Marais.

Fetch a copy of Le Figaro. Leaf through the classifieds and find our dream come true: the perfect pied-a-terre.

A few caveats. An ad with the words rue ani- meée (lively street) means the street is so noisy you car’t hear yourself think. Atypique signals that the apartment is over-the-edge strange; perhaps the rooms are triangular in shape. Coquet (cute) is code for an apartment so small you can’t swing a cat in it. And nous consulter (price on request) hints that unless you have the resources of a sultanate, you can’t afford it.

Now, throw caution to the winds. Suppose you have experienced a coup de foudre—love at first sight—and you are irrevocably and des- perately infatuated with the idea of buying an apartment, not just in the Marais, but in the Place des Vosges.

It so happens that Emmanuel de Poulpiquet, director of the Marais office of Daniel Feau, a high-end real estate agency in Paris, has a list- ing for an apartment in the Place des Vosges. We will get to the price tag later, but for now, let’s find out something about Paris real estate from an insider’s perspective.

De Poulpiquet sits behind his desk on the Rue de Turenne (not such a good street, he tells me) in a crisp white shirt, striped silk tie, and gray wool suit with a discreet plaid check; the glint of gold flashes from a ring inscribed with a crest.

“The Marais is difficult,” he informs me. “Nar- row streets. No room to park the Mercedes. For

Elegantly eccentric, Fabien Douillard, an antique-textile restorer, has decided he prefers the 18th century—and now dresses accordingly. “For the moment,” he says, “it enriches my life.”

drifting from a diner’s lips, lasting as the stones of the Place des Vosges, give the Marais its style. To live here confers pride. Says a resident, “You walk through the Place des Vosges, see tourists and think: They’re only visiting. | live here.”

the French with big money, it’s not so chic. They buy elsewhere—in the 16th, for example, not because it’s historic, but because it’s expensive.

“But,” he says, warming to the topic, “we have le bobo.” Bobo is shorthand for bourgeois bohe- mian, that subset of thirty- and forty-something- year-olds who don’t allow their socialist leanings to interfere with an enjoyment of material plea- sures. Bobos dress in retro-hippie-shabby-chic and shop for little Theo or Mathilde in shops like Petit Boy or Jacadi for such necessities as

lime green slippers with sequins. They drive small cars and can be found eating lunch at Le Pain Quotidien, where everyone sits at long tables in a show of equalitarianism, but nobody talks to one another.

The Marais happens to be prime bobo terri- tory, and de Poulpiquet knows the psychology of his potential clients like a sommelier knows his wines.

“Their mother and father came from smart addresses in the 6th, 7th, or 16th, but they want to be different,” de Poulpiquet says. “They come to the Marais. They look. They like what they see, and in the afternoon the father comes to write the check.”

Bobos would probably not be in the market for a Place des Vosges apartment—too expen- sive, even for them. But since I’m window- shopping and can afford to dream, | insist that de Poulpiquet show me the apartment. He is, it turns out, showing it to a client this afternoon

and agrees to let me tag along.

The apartment has good bones and an impeccable pedigree. Carved out of the for- mer home of a 17th-century duke, it’s 2,300

square feet, with two

D> WEDSITE EXCLUSIVE | bedrooms and See more of the enchanting and a half baths. Marais through the eye of Among its selling photographer William Albert points is a master bed- room the size of a small theater, with silk fabric on the walls, a

two

Allard’s lens. Visit our photo Ballery at nationalgeograph ic.com/ngm/0308.

44 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

waterfall of crystal chandeliers on the ceiling, and huge French windows that open up to a sweeping view of the square.

The price? Almost three and a half million dollars; when my eyebrows shoot up, he points out that anything similar in London would cost twice as much. It wouldn’t be me, or that day’s client, but sooner or later someone would fork out the equivalent in euros and enjoy a view once reserved for the nobility of France.

In the fairy tales the prince appears on cue; the glass slipper fits; the beautiful couple lives

happily ever after, As Dominique Alavoine knows, magic happens, unplanned, unexpected.

The Marais has had its share of magic. Rags to riches is the ultimate fairy tale. The slum becomes a palace; mice turn into bichons frises on dainty gold leashes. We want to believe the story ends there. Perhaps the next apartment in the Place des Vosges will sell for five million dollars. Per- haps the Era of Exposed Beams will last forever.

Then again, perhaps not. If a taste for truffles is replaced by a taste for le Big Mac; if the Marais turns into Disney World-on-the-Seine,

“We must be kind to fashion, because it dies so young,” observed the French writer Jean Cocteau. Even now, word has it, the neighborhood around the Rue Oberkampf, a former industrial area across town in the 11th arrondissement, has become the new hub of Paris cutting-edge cool.

Nothing stands still. The Marais—fashion- able in the 17th century, unfashionable in the 18th century, downright slummy in the 19th, now newly chic—could lose its luster once more. After all, forever-after is only for fairy tales. 0

well, c’est la vie.

MARAIS 45

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aN IN CHILE'S KTACAMA DESERT «9, THE DEAD LIVE FOREVER;

Seg ae _AND HOPE NEVER DIES. ay

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HOt breath of active volcanoes rises from Polloquere— a roiling field of thermal pools—recalling the fiery forces that started the Andes heaving skyward some

0 million years ago. The range is still rising about an inch each century.

It may look like a one-horse town, but San Pedro de Atacama hosts swarms of tourists. Most come for desert excursions; a museum housing thousand- year-old mummies is the other main draw.

BY PRIIT J

VESILIND

he child sits upright, knees bent,

wearing woolen garments and a

black, four-pointed, finely woven

hat topped with a small feather.

Alongside lie a basket of small corn- cobs, a knotted string bag, and a grub hoe carved from a llama jawbone. Brown braided hair peeks out from behind a metal mask that was meant to ward off evil spirits in the afterlife.

Before archaeologists discovered this tiny corpse in 1985, the Atacama Desert sun had baked its exposed tomb for more than 500 years. The mummy—one of several hundred that have been discovered along the Chilean coast—is part of a culture squeezed between the Pacific and the Andes that once scratched out life in a land where life simply shouldn't exist.

Stretching 600 miles from Peru’s southern border into northern Chile, the Atacama Desert rises from a thin coastal shelf to the pampas— virtually lifeless plains that dip down to river gorges layered with mineral sediments from the Andes. The pampas bevel up to the altiplano, the foothills of the Andes, where alluvial salt

52 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

JOEL SARTORE

pans give way to lofty white-capped volcanoes that march along the continental divide, reach- ing 20,000 feet.

At its center, a place climatologists call abso- lute desert, the Atacama is known as the driest place on Earth. There are sterile, intimidating stretches where rain has never been recorded, at least as long as humans have measured it. You won't see a blade of grass or cactus stump, not a lizard, not a gnat. But you will see the remains of most everything left behind. The desert may be a heartless killer, but it’s a sympathetic con- servator. Without moisture, nothing rots. Every- thing turns into artifacts. Even little children.

It is a shock then to learn that more than a million people live in the Atacama today. They crowd into coastal cities, mining compounds, fishing villages, and oasis towns. International teams of astronomers—perched in observa- tories on the Atacama’s coastal range—probe the cosmos through perfectly clear skies. Deter- mined farmers in the far north grow olives, tomatoes, and cucumbers with drip-irrigation systems, culling scarce water from aquifers. In

Ocean gusts keep a paraglider aloft above Cerro Dragon, a desert dune looming over the coastal city of Iquique. The Atacama, edging northern Chile for some 600 miles, lies between the ocean and the Andes—bookends ensuring an arid climate. A high-pressure cell over the Pacific holds back moisture from the west, while the moun- tains block storms from the east. On average only half an inch of rain falls each year, and in some mid-desert spots it has never been recorded, creating vast wastelands. Water scarcity affects long-rooted tribes and city dwellers alike as demand, spurred by recent economic develop- ment, outpaces the meager supply.

the altiplano, the descendants of the region’s pre- Columbian natives (mostly Aymara and Atacama Indians) herd llamas and alpacas and grow crops with water from snowmelt streams.

To the far south, in the Chilean capital of San- tiago, urbanites still consider the desert a waste- land, impervious to environmental damage. Rumors persist that in the mid-1980s the gov- ernment proposed creating a dumpsite for the world’s nuclear wastes in the Atacama, but back- tracked to avoid a public relations disaster. “There's a prejudice and lack of knowledge about the desert,” complains Patricio Fischer, a biol- ogy teacher in Iquique, one of the northern cities. “People see the Atacama as a blank spot on the map.”

That blank spot on the map—roughly cov- ering the Chilean regions of El Norte Chico and El Norte Grande, or Little North and Big North—has been the unlikely engine of much of the nation’s wealth for the past century, lur- ing legions of ambitious workers to the area during a series of economic booms. Newcom- ers began to arrive in the late 1800s, when

Okm 200

RELIEF BY DAVID E. CHANDLER NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAPS,

nitrates were first exploited

in the Atacama Desert. By the 1930s artificial nitrates had been developed, and the Chilean nitrate industry soon collapsed. Today copper, silver, gold, and iron mining drive the economy.

More recently the Atacama has become a popular destination for European ecotourists and Santiago’s adventuresome elite, trigger- ing yet another economic rush. In the Atacama’s three largest coastal cities—Arica, Iquique, and Antofagasta—there are fancy shopping centers with bowling alleys and movie theaters. A glitzy beach scene materializes every summer in Arica, when hordes of vacationers arrive from landlocked Bolivia. Many come lugging golf clubs, intent on playing at one of three courses in the Atacama. Entrepreneurs have laid out fair- ways and greens in the sand: There’s no grass, and swaths of blue paint on the rocks demark “water hazards.”

Meanwhile, competing natural gas compa- nies are bringing power to the Atacama’s copper

ATACAMA DESERT 53

The long arm of the law reaches the middle of nowhere in Chile, where wary police stop a visitor for speeding. Along such empty routes, crosses mark spots where drivers—perhaps lulled to sleep by the monotonous landscape—met their death.

mines and sprouting cities. Pipelines draw fresh water from the Andes to the coast. A new high- way, the Paso de Jama, now spans the mountains to connect Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uru- guay to the desert ports, which ship copper and other minerals to a growing Asian market.

With so much unchecked growth—urban expansion, modernization, the influx of new industry, and a burgeoning tourist trade—might there be a lasting, detrimental effect on a place many believe is infinitely resilient? Will the des- ert shrug off man’s incursions, no worse for wear? To find out, I crisscross the Atacama for four weeks with Sergio Ballivian, my guide and translator, a Bolivian-born adventurer who relishes the Atacama’s ruggedness. In a four- wheel-drive SUV we motor north to south from Arica to Vallenar, from the boisterous surf to the silence of the pampas, through the thin winds of the Andes, through a science fiction land- scape. | want to learn how life survives, even thrives, where it should not.

54 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

ur journey begins as we drive south

from Arica on Route 5, part of the Pan

American Highway that bisects the Chilean desert. It’s a road of ghosts, littered with the skeletons of wrecked vehicles and roadside shrines to crash victims adorned with crosses and plastic flowers. No villages here, no ran- cheros, no fences: only a few scruffy rest stops called posadas, collections of flat-roofed shacks huddled against each other. The mountains— which look as if they’ve been skinned, showing vein and sinew—break the eerie flatness.

More than 10,000 years ago, when the Ata- cama’s climate was more moderate, humans started to populate the region. Archaeologists have long known about the desert’s coastal civ- ilizations, such as the Chinchorro, and have recently found evidence of human settlements in some of the Atacama’s driest caves and valleys. Life could not exist at these inland sites today: An immense and permanent high-pressure cell over the Pacific Ocean fends off weather systems

from the west, and to the east Andean peaks drain moisture from clouds formed in the Ama- zon Basin. On the coast the cold-water Peru Current streams in from Antarctica and chills the desert air, creating a temperature inversion that further inhibits rain clouds.

The arid climate helped spur the desert’s first period of industrial development. In the 1830s prospectors found surface deposits of caliche, a raw nitrate formed over millions of years. With- out vegetation to absorb it or rainfall to flush it away, the “white gold” encrusted much of the desert’s surface. Nitrates were urgently needed in Europe to manufacture explosives and fertilizers. British and other European mining companies arrived with know-how, and by 1895 the nitrate trade to Europe was thriving, supplying Chile with more than half its income.

Soon thousands of workers were migrating to the Atacama’s hundred-plus oficinas sali- treras (nitrate collection and processing depots), built in the starkest, most inhospitable parts of the desert. The nitrate-era laborers were a mix- ture of immigrants, unskilled rural workers, and unemployed men from overcrowded Chilean cities. “One great-grandfather came from Liv- erpool. My other great-grandparents were Swiss Germans,” says Patricio Fischer. “Atacama immi- grants were mostly young, making a break with their homelands.”

In the last half of the 19th century, stiff-upper- lipped and ambitious English mining engineers set up their enterprises in the desert and imposed a culture of time clocks, tennis courts, and Sun- day suits on their managers. Ordinary laborers were treated less well: Bosses exercised nearly com- plete control of workers, who were often paid with tokens good only at the company store. The nitrate industry soon became fertile ground for new, radical concepts of class struggle and labor unions. When the industry bottomed out in the 1930s, thousands of laid-off workers headed south to the cities with anger in their hearts and com- munist ideology in their heads. It was back to the desert that many Chilean communists would, years later, be sent to die.

In 1970 the nation became the world’s first to freely elect a Marxist leader, Salvador Allende. He tried to help the poor by redistributing farm- land among rural workers and nationalizing key industries. But his efforts triggered nationwide strikes led by the business community and

well-to-do Chileans. Amid severe food short- ages, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing authoritarian, ousted Allende in a military coup on September 11, 1973. Pinochet’s army took revenge on Allende supporters, casting a wide net to jail, exile, or execute tens of thousands.

Many of those who were exiled ended up in remote, throwaway locations such as Pisagua, one of the Atacama Desert’s former nitrate- exporting ports. By the mid-1970s Pisagua was a concentration camp that ran out of jail space; the overflow of men were housed in a ruined fish-processing plant, and women were kept in the anterooms of a quaint old British theater.

The theater is still there today. I stop by shortly after we arrive in town and ask historian Cath- erine Saldana Suarez, a bright, erudite woman, about the building’s history. She says the rooms have been redecorated, the handwritten notes on the walls erased, “The mentality of Chilefiios is to fix things up. We don’t want to remember how bad it was.” But her eyes, shining darkly, betray her: “I think a lot,” she says, “and there are some things I cannot forget.”

Pinochet left power in 1990. One of his pris- ons here is now a hotel, its cinder blocks painted red and blue. At the town pier I meet Oscar Romero Gallo, a portly fisherman with a wreath of black hair framing wire-rimmed glasses. He has just published a book on the history of Pisagua and says that when people arrived here after the coup they simply disappeared. “I have a feeling that many were killed and put into the sea,” Romero says carefully, “How many? I don’t know, and I will never know.”

At Pisagua’s cemetery by the sea, where the thunder of breakers might stifle a scream, a sym- bolic open pit and bronze marker commem- orates 19 people found there, murdered by Pinochet's troops.

P | ‘he road from Pisagua returns to the haunting loneliness of the pampas and their deep arroyos. Some water in the

gorges still reaches the ocean during the peak

snowmelt season. We follow one anemic stream to the coast, where the pastel plywood shacks of

Caleta Camarones, a fishing village, simmer in

the sun like a set from a spaghetti Western.

Eighteen families have lived in Caleta

Camarones since the 1970s. To grow plants they

use saline river water—brackish from flowing

ATACAMA DESERT 55

AS LONG oe Le eee

CONTINUES TO | THE AQUI HUMANS [

CAN IN THE ATA

over the desert’s surface minerals. The grounds are littered with old nets, broken-down skiffs, and the hulks of cars that have succumbed to the rutted roads and sandstorms. The commu-

nity’s small fishing boats are anchored off a rugged beach, a five-minute walk from the vil- lage. Manuel Ardiles, a ruddy-faced fisherman with large, callused hands, isn’t very optimistic about the future here. “I'd like to sell my boat because you really can’t make money fishing anymore,” he confides. “We want to start an aquaculture business here to grow abalone.” Fishing, the Atacama’s second economic surge, began 20 years after nitrates went belly-up. Fish have always flourished along the Chilean coast because upwelling carries very cold water from the depths, bringing nutrients close to the surface where sunlight triggers profuse plank- ton growth that fattens up the fish. So between

56 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

NDURE CAMA.

[

ERS, DI

1950 and 1980 thousands of unemployed nitrate miners found work on the sea.

Until 1994 the port city of Iquique stank and rattled with a dozen processing plants that reaped a gluttony of biomass—anchovies, sardines, jack mackerel, and sea bass. Nearly 90 percent of the catch was ground into meal, which became food for pigs, chickens, and other livestock.

Luis Torres Hernandez, an administrator for Lidita canned seafood, offers us small cups of sweet coffee at his office in the port. Torres is a comfortable man wearing a Tommy Hilfiger shirt. “Iquique was the biggest fish-meal port in Chile, but fish meal is a predatory business,” he tells me. “The plants were owned by inter- national corporations that took anything and everything and put it through the grinder.” By all accounts, the large fish-processing companies

LIVING THE HIGH LIFE “They smiled knowing I'd buy a rug,” says photographer Joel Sartore. (He did.) Adapted to thin air, the Mamani family of the Aymara people

(opposite) subsist as high-plains herders and farmers s of years ago. Twin peaks Parinacota and Pomerape (above) tower over

hundrei

s their ancestors did

Aymara essentials: llamas raised for meat and wool.

were not concerned with issues such as workers’ rights or the depletion of fish stocks. They came in, made their money, and left

Climatic changes affected fishing as well. Six years ago El Nifo, the warming of water tem- perature

began driving pelagic fish from the Then La Nia, a chilling of the waters, pro- duced so much food that fish dispersed instead of traveling in schools. When the heyday of fish-meal production ended, many workers drifted inland looking

to snap up new jobs in the Atacama Desert’s copper-mining industry. All but two of the

seafood-processing plants are gone, but Iquique remains an important port city for trans-Pacific trade, and the fish-meal industry shows signs of reviving. And there’s still a frontier qual- ity to the place: Strings of unkempt wooden row houses run up against the 2,000-foot- high sandstone bluffs that loom over the city. Bleached whale bones decorate street corners. At the same time, a glittering casino and a few high-rise resort hotels have sprung up. A para- gliding outfit offers to strap adventurers on a tandem parachute, where they can soar like a condor in the updrafts for hours.

ATACAMA DESERT 57

Small-scale fishermen remain in Iquique, unloading their eclectic catch—everything from tuna-like cojinova and cusk eels with brown splotches and slimy tapering bodies to sea bass and flounder—at the market dock each morn- ing. It’s here that I meet an old local fisherman named Santiago Cere. “There used to be a pier where you could just drop in your line and bring up fish bigger than this,” he says, stretch- ing his arms wide. “Albacore tuna were so plen- tiful that you could harpoon them.” Cere swivels stiffly and braces himself, then with a pleased smile, whips his arm forward, har- pooning the tuna of his dreams. “Whoosh! Whoosh!” he sings.

rom Iquique we continue south along

the coastal road, headed for a remarkable

astronomical observatory perched in the nearby mountains. Pressure blasts snap our ear- drums as semitrailer trucks whip past. The sea pounds against dark lava rocks, and the moun- tains flaunt mineral colors—maroons, blues, greens—that seem nearly organic.

Near the sea a dense fog called camanchaca flows thick. When the stable high-pressure cell offshore traps cool ocean air against the hill- ying clouds that float along the coast as fog. The camanchaca isn’t wet enough to produce rainfall but does provide for an opportunistic ecosystem high

sides, the air condenses into low-l

above the shore—moss-covered cactuses, a vari- ety of shrubs, some rodents, and a few foxes all thriving off the mist.

After six hours of driving we switch from the coastal highway to the inland Pan American, which climbs above the camanchaca’s reach. The sky turns a soft blue as we veer onto a dirt road toward Cerro Paranal. Here, in a place where the air is utterly dry and clear, free from industrial pollution and city lights that obscure the heav- ens, a consortium of European nations has built

the world’s largest optical observatory and per- haps the most technologically advanced. Called, rather blandly, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), it consists of four telescopes, each fitted with a

specially designed mirror that feeds images to a central viewing station, offering astronomers an extraordinary window into deep space. Like Inca priests probing for cosmic favors, they’ve built their temple closest to the heavens, where they can decipher riddles of the universe under a full- starred sky more than 300 nights a year.

As we near the observatory, I can see its four shiny aluminum structures clustered atop an 8,645-foot summit. Security is tight. The safety officer ushers us along a ramp into the living quarters for 15 astronomers and some 100 sup- port staff—cooks, chambermaids, engineers, maintenance men. It looks like a low-slung office building, its flat roof capped in the center with

BLOWN AWAY Swirling winds kick up a huge dust devil near the Pan American Highway (right). Tourists are transfixed by the otherworldly terrain of the Valley of the Moon (below). “I’m an old woman looking for silence and peace,” says 70-year-old Bruna Francini of Italy, at left, with a friend, “This lunar landscape left me breathless.”

a white geodesic dome, but the door opens to reveal an indoor oasis, complete with lush trop- ical vegetation and a sparkling swimming pool. The entire compound is built into a sloping hillside to prevent ambient light from interfer- ing with celestial observations.

Leaving the living quarters, we head toward the observatory. I’m breathing hard from the bite of the altitude as we ascend steel stairs to the catwalk that overlooks the tubular frame of one of the four telescopes in the array. The main mirror is seven inches thick and nearly 27 feet across, ground and polished to exacting standards. Sen- sors and pumps beneath it make corrections every 30 seconds, pushing and pulling the mirror like the springs of an orthopedic mattress. “We can shift its shape all the time, constantly looking for the best configuration,” explains Esteban Illanes, an observatory spokesman.

In the control room astronomers plug coded rows of numbers into terminals. The figures gov- ern the actions of the telescopes, which can be

60 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

positioned to observe any particular niche in the night sky. The VLT array digitally combines light entering all four of its telescopes into a single rendering to produce the highest resolution images of any observatory in the world. A Brit- ish astronomer, Rachel Johnson, shows us dim but tantalizing images of an incomprehensibly remote region of stars, part of an Italian col- league’s effort to determine a star's birth date by noting its color and brightness.

That night we drive off the mountain in utter darkness: Headlights are forbidden until we reach the main highway. Plummeting down to the coast, then north toward the city of Anto- fagasta, we take a wrong turn and fly over a two- foot-tall mound of dirt, landing in a shivering heap. After straightening out the radiator and changing a tire, we limp into the city.

ntofagasta, on the edge of the desert’s vast Ae is one of Chile's fastest growing cities. It’s the center of the Chilean copper industry, and the world’s largest copper port. An island between sea and desert, it’s kept alive by caravans of dusty trucks, pricey water pipelines, and a railroad linked to the mines. The city has flexed from 183,000 people 20 years ago to a whopping 300,000 today.

“It was like a gold rush when mining jobs opened up in the late 1980s,” says Luis Pifones Molina, the editor of Estrella del Norte (Star of the North), the local tabloid newspaper. “A min- ing driver could make $2,000 a month compared with jobs that might bring in $200 down south.”

Inside the huge new shopping mall you can see Antofagasta’s newly minted middle class pushing fancy new baby carriages, eating ice cream cones, checking out the newest computer gadgets, ordering Big Macs, and overextending new credit cards. “But the area doesn’t particu- larly resonate with these people,” says Pifones. “They don’t put their money or their emotion into Antofagasta. They do their jobs here, then go home for the weekends.”

Chile’s copper wealth lies along the tectonic fault that lifted up the Andes. The ore is scraped from immense open-pit mines that sometimes

sully the desert’s aquifers. But there are few orga- nized protests. “The Rio Loa, the most impor- tant river in the north, was contaminated by the Chuquicamata copper mine,” says Patricio Fischer. “But the prime industrial base of the nation will not bend over for a few villages on a contaminated river.”

At the port of Antofagasta, cathodes of cor- rugated copper plate are stacked like giant lasagna on wooden pallets. As a copper port, though, Antofagasta’s days are numbered: In the next four years the government will shift much of Chile’s copper shipments to a new deepwater port in Mejillones, 40 miles north, and leave Antofagasta as the administrative and commer- cial center of the region. Planners will transform the threadbare portion of the present port into an ambitious waterfront development on the order of those in Sydney or Barcelona.

62 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

Alvaro Fernandez Slater, chief of the port, is a calm young man dressed in an earth-tone suit and tie. He hopes that the makeover will be a turning point, a coming-of-age for the city of Antofagasta and, by extension, the entire Ata- cama. “There’s no real alternative for copper,” he says. “We need to build our future now, while we have the money, improving the quality of life so people will make roots and stay. A lot of us came for one or two years and planned to go back to Santiago. But now I have a house, my children go to school here—they’ve become Antofagastans.”

| ‘he state-owned Codelco-Chile company

| produces a third of the nation’s copper.

To visit the company’s Chuquicamata open-pit mine—the largest in the world—we push inland toward Calama, its staging and

WORK AND PLAY Miners masked against sun and cold carve up the land in search of borax (opposite). Although Chile has other mineral exports, copper has become king, accounting for nearly half the country’s economy and a 20 percent rise in the desert population over the past ten years. At Club de Golf (above) near Arica, blue rocks signal a water hazard for die-hard players, who putt on grassless “greens” that are slathered with used motor oil.

depot center. Calama is full of greenery and smells of money, but half the mine workers live in Chuquicamata, or “Chuqui,” the company town tucked into a slope near a thousand-foot- tall, three-mile-long bluff of ore tailings. The expanse of the mine is beginning to overwhelm the town; discarded tailings are slowly burying the now abandoned Roy H. Glover Hospital, once one of the finest in South America.

In a radical move, Codelco-Chile is relocat- ing the entire town—3,500 workers plus their families—to new housing projects in Calama. Miners living near the processing plants have

experienced severe health problems. But the official reason for the move is Codelco-Chile’s desire to secure certification from the Inter- national Organization for Standardization (ISO) According to the ISO, conditions at the mine are safe for working, but laborers and their families live too close to the mine’s production areas

To find out how miners are faring, we drive from Calama to the union headquarters in Chuqui. The union president, Mirta Moreno Moreno, sits behind an overstacked desk, wear- ing a brown suit, looking tired. Foreigners have seldom benefited her or her workers, so at f

ATACAMA DESERT 63

Ne

Irou-red hills sculpted by wind dwarf the only road from Calama to San Pedro de Atacama, High above, the tower of Quitor—a restored pre-Columbian settlement—stands watch over a long-lost empire.

URBANITES CC THE REG WASTELAN SPOT ON THE IMPERVIOUS °

she fends off our questions with banalities. “There’s arsenic and many other chemicals in the air,” she says. “Every breath here can be haz- ardous. We have to be constantly monitoring the work conditions.”

“But I’ve heard that the wages are the high- est in Chile,” I tell her.

She stiffens up, eyes flashing: “They may pay us with cash, but we pay with our lives. Practi- cally none of our retirees have reached retire- ment age. They all leave after an accident or because of poor health. They don’t get old; they go home to die. My father worked all his life here. He was only 54 and suffering from pul- monary silicosis. After watching him die, I decided to focus my energies where my heart took me—the health issues of workers.”

Before leaving, we tour the mine and pro- cessing plants. From the rim of the pit it’s hard

66 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

to fathom distance: The copper mine is a series of terraces three miles across and a mile deep. But my eyes insist otherwise until I see the speck of a 50-foot-tall dump truck—looking like a lost roach—crawIl across one of the levels, hauling 360 tons of ore to the edge of the pit.

he road from Calama to San Pedro de

Atacama, the tourist center of northern

Chile, slants through the desert haze, with snowcapped volcanoes floating behind the lower hills like stage drapery. Here are the rock-strewn badlands where Nomad, a semi- autonomous rover vehicle designed by U.S. scientists for Mars, trained in 1997 for its upcoming mission. And just last spring scien- tists from Carnegie Mellon University, the Uni- versity of Tennessee, Chile, and NASA visited the Salar Grande—a region of the Atacama with

ELLI Lush fur and suspicious eyes defy the Atacama’s reputation as a lifeless

void. In the south, dense coastal fog called camanchaca nour; cactuses, and creatures such as the gray fox (above

hes scrub, columnar At a higher and drier altitude, a

herbivorous viscacha (opposite)—a close relative of the chinchilla hunted for meat and fur—puffs up against sharp desert cold.

a startling resemblance to the red planet—to begin developing a robot that will search for signs of life elsewhere in our solar system.

The Atacama’s extraterrestrial likeness is help- ing to attract an increasing number of tourists, Europeans in the Chilean summer season, urbanites from Santiago in winter. We cross the sere basin known as the Plain of Patience, where the desert shimmers with pastel layers of gyp- sum, clay, and minerals, and the geologic weird- ness of salt-rock called the Valley of the Moon. We slip between iron-red pinnacles with spines like the backs of prehistoric reptiles. Surely a

misplaced landscape, intended for some other world, it lacks the topography and soft edges of erosion that limn most of Mother Earth.

Beneath the shadow of the Licancabur Vol- cano, San Pedro has become an oasis village of sunbaked adobe houses and red dirt streets set between the desert and the altiplano. Some of the planet’s most provocative landscapes ring San Pedro, enticing 36,000 visitors and eco- tourists a year to its dusty little he

On most mornings, in the darkness before dawn, up to 30 vans and jeeps trundle along disastrously pitted roads, past herds of wild

ATACAMA DESERT 67

vicufias, to the 14,000-foot-high Tatio geyser field. This is the time to catch the spectacle of dozens of geysers erupting in unison. Other groups motor south to spy flamingos in the crunchy salt flats, or gather on a sand dune to wait for the blaz- ing theater of sundown in the Valley of the Moon.

In San Pedro there are steak houses with cozy fireplaces and live Andean music. We stop for a cappuccino in a corner bar that advertises 15 types of coffee. But the town has become a shell of its former self: The native Atacama Indians who once lived here have now moved far from town. They’re mostly farmers who grow fruits and vegetables using ancient irrigation tech- niques. They collect easy rent money from the newcomers living in San Pedro but gripe about the price of change. “The big hotels are not buy- ing our local products,” claims Juan Caerez, a round-faced farmer. “It’s cheaper for them to bring produce in from Santiago.”

I’m the sole guest on a guided trip from a pricey tourist hotel in San Pedro. My guide, Rosa Ramos, a beauty whose bronze skin stretches smooth and tight across high cheekbones and a classic Inca nose, cheerfully runs through her routine as we explore a canyon filled with water- falls from rivers that flow from the Andes. She points out a desert pharmacy—rica-rica, a sage- colored bush used to cure stomach ailments, chanar trees good for coughs, algaroba trees for making chicha, an Andean liquor.

I ask Ramos what life was like here when she was younger, before the tourist rush. “When I was a small child, we ate mostly what we grew and raised—llama meat, milk from cows, cheese, tomatoes, corn, potatoes,” she says. “In the summer our whole family would go high in the mountains where there are good pastures. Now our traditional way of life is almost gone. My mother has sold the sheep to pay for our

7O NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

education. Young people like to have nice clothes, and so we find jobs in Calama, or in the mines, or in tour- ism. So here | am.”

The Inca used to climb volcanoes to make offerings to their gods and ask for blessings, Ra- mos adds. “Now we climb for tourism.” But a few months ago she and her husband hiked to the top of Licanca- bur and slept on the summit. “It was very emotional,” says Ramos. “We made offerings of coca leaf, corn, and chicha to Mamacocha, the mother of water.”

fter hearing Ramos'’s story, | want to make

my own homage to the desert by spend-

ing a night where life does not exist—

in the driest, most desolate region of the central Atacama. My guide, Sergio, takes us down an old nitrate road to a place where rain has never been recorded, where the possibilities of life are nil, where there are no survivors of the 10,000-year- old Atacama drought: no chiggers or scorpions, no moss or algae, no predators, no prey. Sterility. As we stretch out our sleeping bags, there are no distant yaps of dogs or growls from diesel engines—only the soft buzz of wind. A sudden cold bores in, as if there were no atmosphere. We lean our heads back to find that the sur- rounding hills form an immense aperture to

“You die here, you dry here,” they say in the Atacama. Corpses left exposed by looters quickly shrivel in the sun. At this miners’ cemetery in Puelma, open coffins are everywhere, the bodies inside still laced in their boots. Many old mining settlements (and their dead) lie abandoned in this desert. Despite such desolation, the human footprint continues to swell, leaving its mark in the shifting sands.

infinity. The stars emerge. Orion the Hunter rises and stalks across the sky. A satellite, cheery and brisk, rushes through like a commuter late for work. The desert sky is not a curtain, but a deep, unutterably thick continuum of starlight that spirals off and fades to dust.

I lie awake, glad to feel a part of the desert, thinking about the stubborn resilience of life. Above, planets gleam coldly in the void. Like the Atacama, they too are hostile to life. Yet here, in the desert, as long as snowmelt fills the aqui- fers with fresh water, humans can endure.

But will they thrive? Probably not. After they

have exploited the land and sea with their industrial prowess and technological savvy, the desert will eventually spit them out. Copper may last another 50 years, but there are no new eco- nomic booms in sight. Soon life may be too costly, too arduous, or too brutish, and most of the current inhabitants will sound retreat, leaving their ancestors in the dust, perfectly preserved. O

Enjoy tales from the “abso: lute desert” with On Assign:

ment notes from Priit Vesilind and Joel Sartore, then zoom in on more images at nationalgeographic.com/ ngm/0308.

ATACAMA DESERT 71

Kittiwakes cavort in the Alaska‘Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, a string of critical wildlife havens skirting the state’s rugged coast.

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BY JOEL K. BOURNE, JR. PHOTOGRAPHS BY SUSIE POST RUST ASSISTANT EDITOR

ernon Byrd, bundled from head to toe in an orange survival suit,

clutched the side of a bouncing Zodiac as it skittered toward a

ragged, two-humped island jutting from the frigid blackness of the Bering Sea. Bogoslof. Biologists like Byrd say the name as if the island were sacred, and in a way it is. The name means “theologian” in Russian. No ship can sail within three miles of its shore; no fisherman can venture within eighteen. Even the biologists in charge of the island visit only every few years so as not to

disturb the raucous array of wildlife that inhabits every nook and cranny, from

hordes of tufted puffins burrowing in the volcanic earth to a handful of Steller

sea lions—twice the weight of polar bears— lolling like giant sausages on the black sand.

“When I first came here in 1973, about 5,000 Steller sea lions ringed the island,” Byrd said, splashing ashore. “We tried to land, and they wouldn't let us on the beach.” Now he counted only about two dozen massive heads above the throng of northern fur seals, the sea lion’s smaller, darker cousin. “Everything points to good prey availability at Bogoslof,” Byrd said with a tinge of Carolina drawl. “But sea lions continue to decline. And that’s interesting.”

Of course nearly everything in this salty realm is interesting to Vernon Byrd, who claims to have one of the best jobs in the U.S. Fish and Wild- life Service. As senior biologist for the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, Byrd has the run of one of the strangest and farthest flung pieces of public real estate in the nation: a mostly vertical, guano-encrusted archipelago that

JOEL SARTORE

includes 2,500 islands, cliffs, and outcroppings, not to mention 20 active volcanoes. If over- laid on the lower 48 states, his 4.5-million-acre domain would extend from Georgia to Califor- nia to North Dakota.

Aside from a few scattered fishing villages and military outposts, most of the refuge is pri- meval wilderness rarely seen by human eyes. Yet it’s a mecca for wildlife, attracting one of the largest concentrations of seabirds and marine mammals in the world. More than 40 million seabirds—80 percent of Alaska’s total—and thousands of sea lions, sea otters, seals, and wal- ruses flock to these storm-wracked shores to rest, breed, and raise young during the short north- ern summer.

The heart of the refuge lies in the Aleutian Islands, that long bony finger of Alaska that tick- les the chin of Russia. The Aleutians separate two of the richest marine ecosystems on the planet: the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. The plankton-laden waters support an astonishing array of marine life, not to mention thousands of fishermen, processing-plant workers, and Alas- ka natives. The symbiotic relationship between land, water, people, and wildlife is as palpable here as the shroud-like fog or horizontal rain.

But despite such apparent abundance, all is not well on this Alaska coast. Since seabirds and marine mammals consume vast quantities of fish and plankton, they make good bellwethers for the health of the marine ecosystem. Thou- sands of top predators in western Alaska waters have vanished within the past 50 years, includ- ing more than half of the northern fur seals, 75 percent of the sea otters, and 80 percent of the Steller sea lions, which were listed as endangered in 1997. Some scientists think a slight rise in the temperature of the Bering Sea may favor leaner prey species, like pollock, over fattier capelin and herring. Others suspect high levels of DD'T and PCBs in the animals, toxins that have migrated north in the atmosphere or were spilled at military bases on the islands. Environmental groups point the finger at a commercial fishery that removes some two million metric tons of

A sea otter cradles her pup off Adak Island. Hunted to near extinction by 1911, sea otters rebounded in the Aleutians until the 1980s. Since then their numbers have fallen 75 percent, one of the sharpest wildlife declines in recent history.

ALASKA WILDLIFE REFUGE 77

Proces. fisherman's gold.

potential prey from the Bering Sea each year— roughly half of all U.S. fish landings.

The issue boiled over three years ago after several groups sued the National Marine Fish- eries Service, the agency responsible for regu- lating fishermen as well as protecting endangered marine species. A federal judge sided with envi- ronmentalists, prompting the service to ban trawlers for 20 nautical miles around key sea lion sites. The ban infuriated fishermen and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who claimed it had little scientific basis. Stevens inserted language into an appropriations bill that granted a year to come up with a more palatable plan—today a hodge- podge of protected zones ranging from 10 to 20 miles—and he earmarked more than 40 million dollars for new research to find the cause of the sea lions’ decline. How to best protect the sea lions remains hotly debated, leaving scientists like Vernon Byrd to scour the refuge for clues.

78 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

sing-plant workers on Unalaska unload a hold full of in this case halibut—from one of hun- dreds of boats plying the brutal but lucrative waters of the Bering Sea. About a tenth of all seafood caught in U.S. waters comes through Unalaska Bay (right) and nearby Dutch Harbor, one of the best anchorages in the Aleutians.

he Steller sea lion isn’t the first of Georg Wilhelm Steller’s discoveries to run afoul of humans. As Vitus Bering’s naturalist on the Russian expedition that discovered Alaska in 1741, the German scientist spent barely three days on Alaska soil, yet returned to Russia with descriptions of numerous species unknown to the Western world. Many carry his name, including the Steller’s jay, Steller’s eider, and Stel- ler’s sea cow, a docile relative of the manatee. But it was a species that does not bear Steller’s name that entertained him the most. “Altogether it is a beautiful and pleasing animal, cunning and amusing in its habits, and at the same time ingratiating and amorous,” wrote Steller after observing a frolicking sea otter. “|It] deserves from us all the greatest reverence.” Bering’s sailors, however, had something else in mind. After surviving a shipwreck and scurvy, which took Bering’s life, the crew limped back

to Petropavlovsk in a makeshift boat loaded down with 900 sea otter pelts. For each pelt, Chi- nese merchants paid the equivalent of a year’s wage for a Russian clerk, beginning a legacy of natural resource exploitation along Alaska’s coast that continues to this day. Russian fur traders enslaved th faring Aleuts who inhabited the islands, forcing them to hunt sea otters, and later fur seals. While Aleut hunters speared otters from their skin kayaks, known as baidarkas, the Russians lived like Cossack kings among the

Aleut women. Their motto: “God is high above

and the tsar far away.” By the time the Russians sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, they had wiped out more than half a million sea otters and millions of fur seals, while their guns and diseases had reduced the Aleut population from an estimated 12,000 to roughly 2,000. Not to be outdone, U.S. fur traders more than doubled the annual Russian fur harvest.

When sea otters and fur seals were finally pro- tected by international treaty in 1911, the otter was all but extinct, and only a tenth of what had once been 1.5 million fur seals remained. President William Howard Taft declared the Aleutian chain a wildlife reserve in 1913 pri- marily to protect the sea otters, and the popula- tion slowly began to recover. By the 1980s, with the help of Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, otters had reestablished themselves on many islands and were back to healthy levels of more than 65,000 in the Aleutians. But then Jim noticed their numbers drop again. a soft-spoken U.S. Geological Survey sientist, has spent most of the past 30 years studying the interwoven relationships between otters, sea urchins, and kelp in the islands, and now and then his ideas rock the boat of ecology. His latest theory: The falling population of sea otters, fur seals, and Steller sea lions has nothing

stes

ALASKA WILDLIFE REFUGE 79

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NATIONAL wiLolflFe "8. NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN Legacy of Wildlife and War «. With some 2,500 islands, cliffs, and rocky spires dotting

Alaska’s vast coastline, the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge is transcontinental in scale. Each year millions of seabirds and thousands of marine mammals return to these craggy shores to raise their young. Most of the refuge is gale-whipped wilderness rarely glimpsed by humans. But human impacts have been profound, from the introduction of foxes and rats, to overfishing vs, and pollution from military bases.

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mg The Big Thaw £ Summer ioe to a half million murtes and kittiwakes, Cape Lisburne (above) supports the refuge’s northern- s most Séabird colony—and the one most vulnerable to changes in Arctic ice cover from global warming: The early breakup and dispersion of sea icein recent years made it difficult for kittiwakes to find prey, leading to the birds’ first known failure to lay eggs. pe Zi F ALASKA 5 5 jg (U.S.) ‘ - Wf bok ; CANADA é Anchorage ~ pin /% * f a NORTH ee AMERICA ‘ 4 Zp of : 2 © Homer * x j ps ‘ 2 o ; } . eget a nd / a 7, BS os . 0. eg : -«— sas Tae oe e t Gulf of Alaska Seen ener eu” gens: RE Sitka =. St. Lazaria | 1 Me bce Land included in Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge Alaska Maritime N.W.R. includes some public and Hary |s-—= private land holdings | Scale varies in this perspective. Distance from Attu Island to wi ee reer pet e Forrester

NGITAL ELEVATION DATA Y US. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAPS

Petrel Central Just 15 miles from Sitka, St. Lazaria (above) is one of the refuge’s few islands in southeast Alaska, where sea- bird and marine mammal populations have remained relatively stable. Barely a mile long, the island lures some 250,000 pairs of storm-petrels each year and the occasional brown bear from nearby islands.

4s

ALASKA WILDLIFE REFUGE 81 135"

to do with temperature increases, overfishing, or contaminants. Estes thinks they’re being eaten. On a crisp summer morning I joined Estes and fellow researcher Tim Tinker for an otter survey of the waters around Adak Island, a for- mer Cold War spy base so far out in the Pacific it’s closer to Petropavlovsk than to Anchorage. Estes handed me an orange flotation suit before we boarded a 17-foot Boston Whaler for the sur- vey. “They're not really survival suits,” he said, pulling the heavy coveralls over his lanky frame. “They just help rescuers find your body.” Luckily it was one of those rare bluebird days that occur perhaps once a month in the Aleu- tians, when the clouds part, the wind dies, and the rugged splendor of nature’s handiwork is etched against the pale northern sky. Soon we were nosing along a rocky shore seemingly unchanged since Steller’s time. The waterline embraced a labyrinth of habitats transformed

82 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

by each tide. Rainbow-hued harlequin ducks and mottled brown common eiders flushed from hideouts, while mountains rose 2,000 feet straight up from the jade water. But as we cruised through the watery niches that were classic otter habitat, we spotted few otters. Those we did see were wary: Their wizened faces quickly submerged at our approach. By the end of the day, we'd tallied just 59 adults and 21 pups. Estes shook his head. “A decade ago we would have seen 600.”

That evening, over baked halibut and beer, Estes explained his theory. When he visited near- by Amchitka in the early 1990s and discovered that half the island’s sea otters had disappeared, he found high levels of DDT and PCBs in those that remained. He suspected the contaminants might be the problem. But on other islands he found populations with low contaminant levels, and they were falling too. He was baffled.

Bering Sea fur trade

Then one of his colleagues witnessed a star- tling phenomenon: A killer whale came up and chomped an otter. Though orcas are known predators of much larger sea lions and seals, few had ever seen one take an otter, which would be the orca equivalent of an after-dinner mint. But the next day the researcher observed another attack. Then Tim Tinker saw it happen at Adak. Soon some of the otters they’d implanted with radio transmitters were disappearing.

Though Estes was skeptical at first, he and Tinker began to suspect the connection when they noticed that sea otters in Adak’s Clam Lagoon were not disappearing. The lagoon otters don’t go out to sea, and orcas are blocked from entering the lagoon by the pilings of a small one- lane bridge at its mouth. But elsewhere off Adak, Tinker said, “otters were dropping like stones.” By 2000 up to 90 percent of the otters on some islands were gone.

Taking a break from baiting halibut hooks, Warren Kushin (left, at left) chats with friends under the midnight sun on St. Paul, in the Pribilof Islands. Home to more than half the world’s northern fur seals and the largest Aleut village in Alaska (above), the island—once the gold mine of the now struggles for economic survival.

What would make an orca that evolved to eat great whales and other large prey target a 60- pound otter? Estes believes the root of the prob- lem may go back to the days of commercial whaling. From the 1940s to the 1960s, whaler. killed half a million whales in the North Pacific and southern Bering Sea. With the large whales gone, Estes thinks the orcas turned to sea lions and harbor seals, whose numbers then fell through the late 1980s. Once they ate their way through much of the pinniped population, he believes the orcas changed prey again, taking some 40,000 sea otters in the central Aleutians alone in the past 15 years.

“It’s an incredible theory,” Estes said. “It may or may not be true. But it makes a lot of sense.”

Maybe. But Chuck Fowler, former head of the fur seal program for the National Marine Fish- eries Service, believes the orca hypothesis min- imizes the impact of the most adaptable and

ALASKA WILDLIFE REFUGE 83

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iu

Staying well out of Pe reach of aggressive bulls;.a researcher picks dead fur seal pups frouca St.Paul rookery.to look for cities toa SO percent population decline since the 1950s.

Counting birds is a full-time job for refuge staff on St. Lazaria (right) and Buldir (far right), where biologist Vernon Byrd (above) and crew captured 17 Aleutian Canada geese for a breeding program in Russia. Once believed extinct, the birds are now flourishing.

robust predator in these waters—humans. “Commercial fishing takes biomass out of the Bering Sea at levels ten- to one-hundred-fold more than the marine mammals are taking,” said Fowler.

f fish scales were money, the muddy streets

of the city of Unalaska—also called Dutch

Harbor after its port—would be paved with gold. Tucked in the eastern Aleutian chain, the town of about 4,300 permanent residents boasts the best anchorage in the islands, making it ground zero for the fishery—marine mammal debate. Thousands of transient fishermen and processing-plant workers come here each year to find their fortune. “It’s like the end of the Wild Wild West,” said Rick Knecht, director of the local Museum of the Aleutians. “Even in the rest

of Alaska people think we’re just a bunch of

drunk fishermen brawling in the streets out

86 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

here. But now more families are moving in, It’s becoming a real town.”

Since 1988 Dutch Harbor has consistently ranked as the top fishing port in the nation in either pounds landed or value of product or both. It’s the latest upswing in a historic boom- and-bust cycle that began when the village was the western center of the Russian sea otter trade, followed by the herring boom and crab boom, all of which eventually fizzled. The money fish of the moment is walleye pollock, a sleek, prolific cousin of the cod that accounts for a third of all U.S. landings. Big trawlers, ranging from 130- foot catcher boats to 300-foot floating pro- cessors, are allowed to net more than a million metric tons of pollock each year. Long a staple in the varied diet of Steller sea lions, pollock is now in just about every fish stick, fish-filet sand- wich, and tub of imitation crabmeat sold in the U.S., Europe, and the Pacific Rim.

“Most people aren’t aware of what’s out here,” yelled Rocky Caldero, manager of the UniSea processing plants, as he led me through a maze of machinery, conveyors, and catwalks that was throbbing to a high-voltage hum. “The plants here are the largest and most complex fish-processing plants in the U.S. The top three or four in the world in terms of volume. We'll process 2.2 million pounds a day of just pol- lock.” Virtually every ounce of the fish is used. The roe is a popular and expensive gift in Japan. Filets are flash frozen and sold through- out Europe and the U.S. Fish too small to filet are churned into surimi, a white, tasteless, rub- bery paste that is a major ingredient in artificial crabmeat. The waste is ground into food for eel farms in Asia. Even the oil is burned as fuel in the plants’ generators.

The sea lion ruling that temporarily extended the fishing ban around rookeries in 2000 hit the

industry hard, said Caldero. Boats had to go farther out to get the pollock, reducing the fresh

ness of their catch. “Instead of getting fish less than 40 hours old, you get fish 60 to 80 hours old,” Caldero said. “You can’t do much with that. You can’t make filets. Roe quality is diminished.”

Like most people in the business, Caldero buys the industry position that the pollock fleet is the best managed fishery in the world. “Most people in the industry want to protect it to make money,” Caldero said. “They don’t want the sea lions to go the way of the sea cows. I don’t think fishing pollock is the problem. The studies I’ve read say there’s not enough nutritional value in pollock to make the sea lions survive.”

Those studies, based on captive-feeding tri- als, show the animals lost weight on a steady diet of pollock but not on oilier fish such as her- ring or sand lance. It’s come to be known as the junk food theory. Since pollock are voracious

ALASKA WILDLIFE REFUGE 87

predators of other prey species, the industry line goes, then fishermen should catch more pollock to allow the other species to rebound.

“None of these theories can be proven,” said Ken Stump, one of the Greenpeace architects of the environmental lawsuit that led to the fishing ban. “The industry latches on to the junk food hypothesis, ocean warming, and orca predation because they believe it exonerates them if it’s a natural phenomenon.” Stump believes that the removal of 150 billion pounds of fish from Alas- ka’s waters since the 1960s has likely caused a fundamental shift in the marine ecosystem: There simply isn’t enough food left to support historic populations of marine mammals.

Bob Storrs can see both sides. The wiry, bearded fisherman has been an environmen- tal activist for two decades in Unalaska. When he’s not fighting to protect local small-boat fishermen from the politically powerful factory trawlers, he’s either pulling halibut over the rail of his 32-foot long-liner or sipping his whis- key neat from a corner stool at the Elbow Room—Unalaska’s notorious bar and the de facto headquarters of the Bering Sea fleet. Yet he sided with the big boys against the 20-mile ban around rookeries.

“The folks that were hurt the worst were the small-boat fishery,” said Storrs from his perch at the Elbow. “If the ban had stayed in place, | would be out of business as would everyone else. It made it very hard to be an envi- ronmentalist in western Alaska.” Still, Storrs believes the industry is at least partly responsi- ble for the sea lions’ decline, but not because the animals are starving. “There was a huge take of sea lions by the pollock trawl fleet in the 1970s,” said Storrs, shaking his head. “It was leg- endary. They were getting 40 sea lions a tow and dumping the carcasses overboard.”

In fact, scientists estimate that U.S. and for- eign trawlers may have caught as many as 50,000 sea lions in Alaska waters between 1960 and 1990, while fishermen legally shot an estimated 34,000 during the same period, ostensibly to protect their livelihood and their gear. Long viewed as a nuisance to fishermen, the sea lions finally gained protection in 1990 from shooting by all but Alaska native subsistence hunters.

Studying the ocean’s inhabitants has never been easy, especially in the often brutal seas that Steller sea lions call home. Vernon Byrd believes

88 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

that natural and human factors have combined against the animal. “No doubt removing the fish has had large effects,” Byrd said. “But will this cause extinction? We don’t know, Then here come the killer whales. They've always eaten a cer- tain number of sea lions. But now with the pop- ulation depressed, they take more, percentage- wise. Then you have a bad storm year, which in- creases pup deaths, and things start stacking up. But I try to explain all that to a guy with boat pay- ments, and he says, ‘Are you sure?’” Byrd paused, then answered the ques- tion. “No, I’m not.”

imes may be

good for the pol-

lock fishermen of Unalaska, but they’re decidedly rocky for the people of the Pribilofs, the small group of islands smack in the middle of the Bering Sea. Here the largest remaining Aleut villages of St. Paul and St. George, each on a separate island within the refuge, are barely keeping their economies afloat.

The two islands, breeding grounds for the largest northern fur seal colonies in the world, were the mother lode of the fur seal trade for nearly two centuries, a source of unimaginable wealth, and an underlying force behind Seward’s Folly in 1867. The federal government's sale of furs from the Pribilof harvest repaid the 7.2- million-dollar purchase price for Alaska within 20 years. The 1911 fur seal treaty banned taking the animals at sea and limited commercial seal- ing to government-controlled harvests by the Pribilof Islanders, who dutifully slaughtered seals for Uncle Sam until the mid-1980s, when animal-rights activists and a dwindling fur mar- ket shut down the federal harvests for good.

arin Holser opened a closet door in her

office in St. Paul and pulled out samples of what

all the fuss was about. The first was a tanned sea otter pelt, jet black and so soft to the touch it was hard to tell where air ended and hair began. Beside it she threw a fur seal hide, buff brown, but equally luxurious. “This is where the animal- rights folks did us a disservice,” said Holser, coordinator of the islands’ stewardship program for local youth. “Here was a sustainable harvest that supported an indigenous village. People were feeding their families, not a huge industry.”

After commercial sealing ended, St. Paul joined the lucrative crab fisheries in the Bering Sea. Then the Pribilof red and blue king crab stocks crashed, followed by the opilio snow crab stocks. Crabbing seasons closed, the island’s two processing plants cut back, and 80 percent of the tax base evaporated. Today two dozen small long- line vessels fish for halibut around the island,

A Steller sea lion bellows its trademark roar near Unalaska. Steller populations have tumbled 80 percent in western Alaska waters since the 1970s. Most environmentalists blame overfishing, while most fishermen blame everything else.

providing up to half of many families’ incomes.

Though the steady paychecks of the sealing days are sorely missed, the heavy hand of the federal government is not. Many elders still smolder over their treatment in World War II, when the Pribilof Islanders were evacuated to squalid “duration villages” near Juneau while the U.S. military took over their islands. Forced to crowd into an abandoned cannery and a min- ing camp without proper food, heat, or running water, the Pribilof Islanders lost 32 people to pneumonia, measles, and tuberculosis during their two-year internment. Most were elders and children. To make matters worse, when they

ALASKA WILDLIPE REFUGE 89

ak

=e

JOEL SARTORE

finally returned home in 1944, they discovered that U.S. soldiers had vandalized their houses and their church.

“We were really mad,” said 80-year-old “Aunt- ie” Mary Bourdukofsky, who had two children in diapers at the time. “We saw pictures of a Ger- man POW camp, with nice Quonset huts with bunk beds and white ceilings. Our feelings really hurt inside for treating us worse than the enemy.”

But her wartime experience and the years of paternalistic management by the Fish and Wild- life Service, which controlled almost all aspects of island life until the early 1980s, hasn’t damp- ened Auntie Mary’s enthusiasm for her wind-

swept home. “My mom said we live by the sea,

and we never grow old,” she said with a smile.

That same twinkle lit the eyes of 25-year-old Candace Stepetin as she gave me a tour of St. Paul in a pickup with Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” blaring through the speakers. Stepetin * AUGUST

90 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC 2003

ep

a a + a + > » on

works with the St. Paul stewardship program cutting fishing nets and plastic packaging from seals that come ashore with a garrote of such garbage around their necks. She showed me three neat puncture scars in her right hand, courtesy of a two-year-old seal she was trying to liberate. “If it had been a larger seal, he could have pulled my arm off,” she said. She pointed out the graveyard, the bar, the Russian Orthodox church, and a hundred or so clapboard houses )0 residents live. The village hugs a small harbor protected by a 50-foot-tall breakwater. Outside the village the island rises in lush hills of purple lupine and wild celery, dotted with Aleutian buttercup. But it’s the ash-colored beaches attracting hundreds of thousands of northern fur seals, along with more than two million birds that nest on neighboring St. George, that spurred the islands’ nickname “the Galapagos of the North.” At the rookeries,

where 5

the big 400- to 600-pound males staked out their territories, which they will defend—fighting and breeding without food or drink—for up to two months. Most of the females, however, had yet to arrive. Only a few lay beside bleating pups. The young bachelors avoided the big bulls, con- tent to sun themselves on their favorite beaches.

While the mass of steaming, writhing bodies is impressive to the first-time visitor, the image is deceiving. Nearly a million fur seals still swim in the North Pacific and Bering Sea, but that’s half the number observed in 1951, when in these pages biologist Karl Kenyon described the rook- eries as “the greatest assemblage of wild animals to be seen in such a limited area.” Compared with photos from Kenyon’s time, the beaches look practically empty.

Though federal harvests ended in St. Paul in 1983, the islanders still kill about a thousand juvenile male seals each year for food. The

“They're not bad boiled,” St. George mayor Alvin Merculief (above), who has picked blue murre s from the islana’s cliffs since childhood. Seabirds, like those on hundred- story High Bluffs (far left), outnumber the islanders some 15,000 to one.

sa

elders relish the boiled meat, pickled flippers, and a rendered seal fat dish some call Aleut Jell-O, but most of the young people | met preferred microwavable pizzas from the local grocery store,

The hunts are community affairs. During one roundup, six islanders set out across the beach to make the initial cull. The seals stampeded toward the water. Yet the Aleuts managed to cut off about a hundred of the younger ones. After separating a dozen or so seals from the main group, four men, their oarlike seal sticks held high, circled the animals as the fog rolled in. The heavy sticks rose and fell. Other men aided by a few children butchered the seals quickly, cutting out the ribs, the liver, the shoulders, the flippers. Tastes just like veal, said one man. Better than a turkey dinner, said another. A few of the once precious skins were saved for crafts, but most were carried to the carcass dump with the rest of the offal.

ALASKA WILDLIFE REFUGE 91

Sculpted

noes, el s, glaciers 1 € ane

monst ionstrot trous Se t as, the , the

e a

—

rN here are bright spots in the Bering Sea have spent dec-

picture. Refuge biolog' ades nursing the Aleutian Canada goose back from the edge of extinction and—thanks to a concerted effort to remove non-native foxes from breeding islands—the birds are now thriving. Steller sea lion numbers are up slightly

for the first time in decades, giving researchers hope that they may have reached the bottom of their long slide. And some islands, such as Bogoslof, seem to be drawing animals ditional breeding areas such as the Pribilofs. “It’s really interesting to compare Bogoslof and the Pribs,” Vernon Byrd said, back on Bogo- slof. “They're geographically similar, with very similar prey in the marine food web. Yet north- ern fur seals and red-legged kittiwakes have increased here, while declining in the Pribilofs. Why is the environment adequate at Bogoslof and not in the Pribs?”

94 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

One of the factors dropped right at our feet a four-inch-long Atka mackerel, shiny silver on the bottom and midnight blue on top. The fish were flying by in a steady stream in the be i tufted puffins, which buzzed overhead like space craft in a Jetsons cartoon. The fish are so big. Byrd said, that a puffin chick will have to wait for the head to dissolve in its stomach before it can swallow the tail. “It'll feed them all day,” said Byrd. “That means much less effort for the par- ents, who would otherwise have to feed them three or four times in the same period with tiny pollock. It translates into better breeding suc- Interesting.” espite the dearth of sea lions on Bogoslof, Byrd is optimistic that the data will soon show what the problems are and that a combined effort from industry, managers, and conserva- tionists will be able to avert their extinction. Meantime, the prospects for other Bogoslof

creatures are looking better. In his inspection of the island, Byrd found that at least half the red- legged kittiwake nests had chicks, and the occu- pancy rate of puffin burrows was high. Male fur seals had established their territories on the

beaches. And the sun was still shining, making Byrd practically giddy. “Sunniest day I’ve ever seen on Bogoslof,” he said.

We headed back to the landing site and put on our orange suits for the ride out to the ref- uge’s research vessel Tiglax, at anchor a half mile offshore. The waves, though less than head-high, cracked on the steep beach with surprising force. We dragged the Zodiac down to the water, waited for a lull, and began paddling madly. But not madly enough. The first wave slapped the boat broadside. The next sucked it up and over, dumping us into the 38-degree water.

After crawling onto the beach like arthritic crabs, we tried again, digging the paddles deeper

In 1942 William Dirks (with son George, above) watched U.S. forces burn his village to keep it from the Japanese. Rebuilt replete with its Russian Orthodox church (left), Atka remains a crucible of Aleut culture, where dancers still celebrate the bounty of the sea.

into the numbing surf. A wave feathered 20 yards in front of us. We barely made it over the crest as the motor cranked and were soon skimming out of the impact zone to the waiting ship.

“All right!” Byrd yelled like a teenager, hold ing up his hand for a high five.

Georg Wilhelm Steller, Alaska’s first natural- ist, once wrote that he had fallen in love with nature. | couldn't help but think that Vernon Byrd had done the same. Steller had no ink- ling of things to come. Many of the animals he discovered on the expedition and described with such joy are now either extinct, endan-

gered, threatened, or

depleted. The future of

those remaining now rests in the hands of scientists like Byrd— and our own. O

ALASKA WILDLIFE REFUGE

Find more images and field

notes on the Alaska Mati. time National Wildlife Refuge and its human and wildlife inhabitants at nationalgeo graphic.com/ngm/0308.

95

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC RESEARCH AND

Stephen Houston Archaeologist Piedras Negras, Guatemala “This place has some of the most spectacular architecture you could hope for. We felt

as if we were digging the Maya Versailles.”

Royal City of the

aya

By Margaret G. Zackowitz

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SENIOR WRITER

Photographs by Mark A. Philbrick

hy go back to a Maya city that was first excavated in the

1930s, a site made famous when the Maya hieroglyphic code was cracked there two decades later? “We went to Piedras Negras because it had almost become a ‘lost city’ again,” says archaeologist and glyph expert Stephen Houston. “Archaeology has changed enormously, and new questions are being asked about Maya urban life.” Remote Piedras Negras, set beside the Usuma- cinta River, rose from a small village, thrived for some 400 years, and then collapsed. Houston, of Brigham Young Uni- versity, has worked six years

Reassembled from pieces found in a royal tomb, this four-inch-high ballplayer mosalc shows trade with coastal centers: It's made of spon- dylus, a prized seashell. Hieroglyphics explain that Piedras Negras's ruler was captured by an enemy king about a.p. 800, but puzzles remain.

KENNETH GARRETT

FIELD DISPATCH

“I feel a : responsibility to handle remains

98 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

- ve 4 e ie eo

THE PROJECT 3

DATES: 1997-PRESENT

FIELD SEASON: TWO MONTHS

TO GET THERE: DRIVE FIVE HOURS THROUGH BANDIT COUNTRY TO THE USUMACINTA RIVER, THEN MOTOR A DUGOUT FOUR HOURS—UPSTREAM. FIELD CONDITIONS: SLEEPING IN POOLS OF SWEAT TO THE ROAR OF HOWLER MONKEYS; MONOTONOUS FOOD; STIMULATING RESEARCH.

on the site to find out why.

Before he could get to the Maya, he had to get past the Marxists. Delicate negotiations were required to persuade the guerrillas to leave their hideout so that Houston's team, includ- ing co-director Héctor Escobedo of Guatemala’s Universidad del Valle, could set up camp. When they finally began excavating in 1997, they found that the guerrilla presence had, unin- tentionally, protected the site: “It's hard to loot a tomb with a machine gun pointed at you.”

The wait was worth it; the city had new riches to bestow. Using the site's carved stelae, which bear rulers’ names and the years of their reigns, Houston was able to date many of the objects he unearthed, in turn clarifying the history of dynas- ties and the city.

About a.p. 400, Maya kings began building pyramids and plazas at Piedras Negras to symbolize their link to the gods and legitimize their rule. The population grew to 5,000. Then, in a.o. 800, invaders captured the king. Piedras Negras “limped along for a few decades,” says Houston, “but once the king was

A noble’s tomb (opposite) emerges under Stephen Houston's brush; more than a hundred graves have been discovered so far. Alcoves in stone mark the entrance to Piedras Negras, where Houston (above, at left) and colleague Zachary Nelson examine petroglyphs. A five-inch- high torso (below), a masterwork of Maya sculpture, was found with other royal goods in a servants’ room. A clay whistle shaped like a midwife (right) dates from a.v. 650.

gone, the city had no purpose.” Palaces were subdivided, ritual sweat baths filled with trash. Soon the people abandoned it altogether. The fate of Piedras Negras strongly suggests that Classic Maya culture collapsed not from drought or overpopula- tion, Houston says, but from the loss of the royal court and the erosion of public faith in the hierarchy. The things the res- idents of Piedras Negras left be- hind continue to tell their story. Stephen Houston is listening. 0

Want to learn more about this “Maya

ommended websites and a bibliography

| Versailles” Piedras Negras? Find rec- at nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0308.

KENNETH GARRETT (RIGHT)

A Land

Whites once took JFivete ms uwesenme) hla <cmma rohital b) hla es

paSSeSSce

have taken it — In the upheaval Zimbal bwe goes hungry,

oe 5 ge eG ieee

By Peter Godwin + Photographs by Gideon Mendel

hree generations of the Stauntons, a white Zimbabwean family, huddle in the small

sitting room of a safe house in the capital, Harare, surrounded by suitcases and cardboard

boxes. They have been chased off their farm with a suddenness that has left them blink ing in bewilderment. Now they wait to leave Zimbabwe for an uncertain future in Australia.

One Tuesday afternoon last year a motorcade of luxury SUVs wound its way slowly across Kachere Farm, which the Stauntons had owned since 1957. The farmworkers reported that behind the dark tinted windows sat Grace Mugabe, the president’s young wife, and her entourage. She apparently liked what she saw: neat fields of maize and soybeans, wheat and potatoes, large greenhouses of roses for export to the Amsterdam flower market.

Within weeks the Stauntons’ garden was full of men and women armed with iron bars and guns. The grandparents, James and Margaret, in their late seventies, phoned the police before locking themselves in the bathroom with their daughter, Angela, and young granddaughters, Caitlin and Sarah, as the attackers smashed down the back door and looted the house. When the Stauntons

finally emerged after two hours, they found the remains of their belongings scattered on the lawn.

| arcwe | | I | ALVECSL Promised a share of the crop if they came back to cut the wheat, Jeremy and Janet Selby return to their former farm. Seized, like much white land, without due process, it now belongs to an army officer and a local official with no experience in farming.

Par Ly IQ al thtul Delegates at a political conference sing the praises of the man emblazoned on their chests—President Robert Mugabe, the architect of land reform. White farmers who oppose him are “enemies of our people,” Mugabe told delegates.

According to the Stauntons, they were ordered off the farm by men who stood with crowbars over their children, while the police looked on passively. The attackers then gave the police a lift back to the station.

The Stauntons were caught up in the final throes of a government campaign to force the country’s white farmers off their land without compensation, land they have inhabited for much of the past century. By early this year only 200 of 4,500 white-owned farms remained fully functioning. The endgame for the white farm- ers can be traced to a fateful day in 2000 when Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, lost a referendum on a new constitution that would have greatly expanded his powers. For this upset defeat—his first—Mugabe would blame the white farmers, accusing them of supporting the newly formed opposition. He said the farm- ers had enlisted their black employees to vote for the opposition too. Thousands of members of Mugabe's ruling party, zANu-Pr, immediately began to occupy farms. Ten white farmers and 27 black workers were murdered; hundreds more were injured, tortured, or arrested.

The effect of this intensified phase of land

reform has been catastrophic. Commercial wheat production last year was down 52 percent from the year before, and the commercial cattle herd fell from some 1.3 million head in 1999 to below 200,000 last year. Meanwhile drought has devastated crop production in the black communal lands, which have traditionally accounted for more than half the country’s maize. This year’s maize production is expected to fall 70 percent short of the country’s needs.

Asa result more than half of Zimbabwe's 12 million people are now threatened with starva- tion. And as the vise of hunger has tightened, Mugabe's men have used it to their political advantage, preventing the distribution of food aid to areas associated with the opposition.

hris Lunga is hardly the kind of man to smash houses or starve his fellow coun- trymen, but he is one of the beneficiaries of the land seizures. At 35, the head of a shipping agency, he was about to buy himself a small farm to run on the side when he read newspaper advertisements offering free white farms. Like thousands of other black Zimbabweans he couldn't resist the offer. Following a lengthy

ZIMBABWE: A LAND POSSESSED 103

application process he was allocated 120 acres, part of a farm owned by Brendon Fox, which was divided among 14 black applicants. The new settlers almost immediately began to squab-

ble when one of them, the former governor of

the province, grabbed a bigger slice than he had

been allotted. Like most white farmers Brendon Fox tried to hold on to a small piece of his land and to with the new arrivals. He helped Lunga starting to plow land for a maize crop, but sh, he was thrown off by the

government. Lunga, who lives near Harare and has no farming experience himself, has hired a full-time manager and comes out to the farm on weekends.

Lunga welcomes land reform, which he sees as long overdue. “My father fought in the same war as Mr. Fox’s uncle, in World War II for the British. After the war white soldiers were allowed to buy farms, but my father, because he was black, got nothing. He died a poor man.

“In any revolution, it’s not fair,” Lunga went

on. “And it is a revolution. We are reclaiming

our land. The British pushed us out, and we're taking it back. Don’t get me wrong, I don't

ret the British coming. I wouldn't be talking to you in English if they hadn't, and we would have still been in the Stone Age.”

Yet Lunga said the transfer of lands from whites could have been better planned. “They should be compensated for equipment, improve ments. But the actual land, that’s a different story. They shouldn't get compensation for the land.”

He is also incensed by the food shortages in Zimbabwe, which he sees as unnecessary. “When

it comes to my stomach, I’m angry. Hungry people are angry people.”

Tapfumaneyi Manzira, a systems engineer who

owns a computer company, also took up the offer of free land. “I have no sympathy for the white

farmers,” he told me. “Maybe they did buy the farms for themselves. It’s collateral damage— tough—like civilian casualties in any conflict.”

But Manzira is frustrated by the way things “got out of control.” He is particularly upset that neither of his neighboring plots is being actively farmed by the new black owners. “Everyone was

Plowing with hope that the govern- ment will deliver seed maize and fertilizer, a young man resettled on a white farm slices through a parched field. With scant rains and little government help, his family, already hungry, will have to turn to roots, ; = berries, and relief food. When the government = * launched fast-

track land reform

three years ago,

~ officials said they

were confiscating white farms on behalf of landless peasants. But without the means to plant, some 200,000 poor resettled blacks are no better off than before.

= 105

caught up in the excitement. And then the real- ity caught up with them—that you can’t just admire the land like a flower. You've got to do something with it, or stay away.”

Many of the new black settlers, those who want to make the most of the land, have been waiting in vain for the seeds, fertilizer, and trac- tors the government has promised them. In the turmoil of the evictions, commercial farm- ers have usually retained title deeds to their land. Even if the government obtains ownership of this land, it is v unlikely that title will be given to the new black settlers. Without security of ten- ure, they cannot, like the whites before them, use land as collateral to bor- row money to buy vehi- cles, fuel (in desperately short supply), fertilizer, and seed. Irrigation pipes have been sold for scrap, wells have fallen into dis- repair, electricity has been cut off because settlers can't pay their bills. As a result many farmers have reverted to subsistence agricultural methods on what were, just a year ago, highly sophisticated, pro-

The brother of a farm‘s new own- er explains to a skeptical white farmer how he will be paid for the equipment that was seized along with his property. ductive agribusinesses.

voidability is a principal element of tragedy, and Zimbabwe's farm chaos— although understandable, perhaps, in

light of past injustices—was avoidable. In recent years land reform has been common cause among nearly all Zimbabweans, white as well as ry measure to correct the inequality between the races.

For much of the 20th century whites pos- sessed at least half the country’s land, even though they made up no more than 5 percent of the population. This land disparity wa: as one of the main causes of the nearly eight- year war for black rule, which ended in 1980 when white-dominated Rhodesia became black- ruled Zimbabwe.

black, seen as a nece

106 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

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The politics of land

When land reform began in 1980 —_ the government bought few white

with independence, black Zimba- _ farms for resettlement. Then in and mixed 1% bweans expected they would 2000, with a deepening economic

finally get their fair share of the crisis and growing opposition to Whites have represented country’s farmland. But under- its rule, the government started to Doeaee nunes ee ney funded and lacking political will, seize white land without payment. owned 40 percent of the land

as recently as 1980,

Victoria

Fast-track land reform—begun in 2000—cut the number of white farms

in full production from 4,500 to 200 early this year, Resettlement estimates, which

vary widely, suggest that 200,000 or more mostly poor blacks have received confiscated Principally Principally National ™ Black- ™ white- ™ Land

land. But the sudden, often brutal change of Verbal “Zebeta ownership disrupted agriculture. Cash crop Land Land

harvests plunged, further weakening the

m= Prime Agricultural Land

ailing economy.

“Harare ———-* Korswonrl Kwekwe,

Gweru,

ZIMBABWE

After 20 years of land reform, 75,000 black families

had been resettled on 9 million acres. Yet whites still owned 28 percent of all

Map perspective includes 100-mile land—and 60 percent of the best farmland

(161-kilometer) grid.

SOURCES. COMMERCIAL FARMERS’ UNION OF White commercial farms grew cash crops ZIMBABWE. LAND TENURE CENTER, UNIVERSITY = ‘OF WISCONSIN MADISON that accounted for 40 percent of Zimbabwe's . 2003 PROTECTED AREAS DATA: UNEP WORLD exports, As the population rose—up 60 per CONSERVATION MONITORING CENTRE

cent since the

arly 1980s—blacks were forced MMATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAPS to farm on increasingly crowded, degraded

communal land, and many migrated to cities

where unemployment soared

To the relief of the white farmers in particu lar, the newly elected leader, Robert Mugabe, made racial reconciliation a centerpiece of his policy. He appointed a white minister of agri- culture and appealed to white farmers to stay on and contribute to the new Zimbabwe. Most of the whites who couldn’t stomach being ruled by a black president had left the country shortly after independence, and those who remained

for the most part accepted the new status quo, setting about farming with vigor in a country freed from wide-scale war. Their produce,

especially tobacco, brought in 40 percent of the country’s export earnings, their crops helped feed the cities, and they employed a quarter of the country’s workforce. By 199 mbabwe was Africa’s fastest growing economy Africa’s breadbasket—frequently to neighbors in need.

—southern xporting food

To achieve independence, Mugabe ha to a program of voluntary land redist funded predominantly by Britain. Beginning in 1985 white farmers were required by law to offer the government of Zimbabwe right of

1 agreed bution,

first refusal on any land that was put up for sale.

Before 1990 the government purchased, at market prices, 21 percent of the land held by whites at independence. Some of those com- mercial farms, however, were handed out not to landless peasants, as stipulated in aid agreements with Britain, but to Robert Mugabe's political supporters. When the extent of this practice was revealed in the local press in 1994, the British protested. Mugabe was unrepentant, and in due course most foreign funding for land purchases was frozen, and the process of land redistribution

stalled. Two decades after independence nearly four-fifths of white farmers were living on prop- erty they had bought after the government had opted not to buy the land for resettlement by blacks.

The slow pace and eventual halt of mean ingful land reform failed to raise more of a spontaneous clamor from ordinary blacks— many of whom remained squeezed into over- crowded communal lands, trying to farm on leached and eroded soils—largely because of the more immediate problems of rising food prices

»

Jostling for posi- tion, primary school students line up for a local nutritional drink that supplements their diet of food aid. A grassroots group distributes the drink in the country’s north- west, long depen- dent on maize and sorghum grown

in more fertile regions. Because of drought and chaos on once pro- ductive commer- cial farms, people now pay dearly for such staples, if they can find them at all. Nationwide more than half of Zimbabweans need food aid.

4\

109

and unemployment. Also by then Mugabe had achieved a virtual one-party state, and Zimba- bwe was urbanizing at a furious rate. Even though 70 percent of the population still lived in rural areas, the younger generation—with the highest literacy rate in Africa—had aspirations to salaried jobs in towns rather than to a life of toiling in the fields, which has become increas- ingly the burden of Zimbabwe's women.

inned to the wall of the office of Delville-

wood Farm is the high court order pro-

claiming that the Selby family was still its legal owner, But in reality Delvillewood Farm, in Mazowe Valley, was already occupied. Major Kanouruka of the presidential guard had taken over the front half, and Molly Mapfumo, a local official, had taken the back. After a four-month tug-of-war in which the farm had been shut down no fewer than nine times, the Selbys were losing heart. Mick Selby, who

farmed here with his father, Jeremy, had had his

house broken into and occupied two months earlier by Major Kanouruka and his young toughs—graduates of a notorious mi i ing camp

As I talked to Mick and his mother, Janet, the new overlords were in evidence. One of the youths had a half-full beer bottle sloshing in his pocket; another, tall and somewhat tipsy, danced around throwing kung fu punches.

“Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans,” they chanted.

“I was born here, I’m Zimbabwean too,” Mick rebutted in Shona—the language spoken by most blacks here—but the major’s enforcers weren't listening.

The Selbys had come back to supervis squadron of combine harvesters churning through their winter wheat crop. That they were allowed to plant the wheat at all was due to a deal they struck to share their land with Major Kanouruka. The Selbys agreed to prepare, plow, plant, fertilize, and harvest a similar field of wheat for him. He agreed to pay his share of the

(‘Oltiare)| Wol k Blacks who once worked on a white-owned farm live in tents and cook donated food near Epworth. About 250,000 farmworkers have lost their jobs. Few, if any, have been resettled under Mugabe's land reform program, which focuses on blacks in communal areas.

ir = ead:

Laying claim to land he says colonists stole from his ancestors, businessman Tapfumaneyi Manzira inspects a fledgling paprika crop on his part of a farm the government divided among better-off blacks. Manzira says land reform is justice: “We are rectifying history.”

costs and reap his share of the profit. Of the latter the Selbys had no doubt; of the former they had no hope. The major had already forced the closure of their bakery, which supplied 15,000 people in the area, as well as their butch- ery and trading store.

After the winter wheat came in, there would be virtually no more activity on the farm, and the hundred workers would be out of jobs. The 45 acres of citrus trees were wilting and would soon die—the irrigation piping on which their health depended had been dug up and sold by the major’s men. The greenhouses where the Selbys grew roses for export to the Netherlands were nothing now but a torn skin of plastic, flap- ping in the breeze against the exposed skeletons of wooden struts. The swimming pool was dark with rotting leaves; the clay tennis court had sprouted a quiff of elephant grass. Delvillewood Farm was rapidly returning to the bush.

o early white visitors the African bush seemed almost empty: Mostly an “unpeopled country,” said an explorer in 1871. Casting his eyes across the wilderness, he mused, “Fancy a church spire rising where

that tamarind rears its dark crown of foliage, and think how well a score or so of pretty cot- tages would look instead of those thorn clumps and gum trees!”

This impression of emptiness was accentu- ated by the Africans’ slash-and-burn agriculture. The land was cleared by fire, and crops were planted by hand, with rain relied upon to water them. When the soil became exhausted after two or three seasons, the farmer moved on to a new patch of bush, The Western idea of land own- ership was alien. One white farmer tells of his grandfather going to see a local chief about buy- ing some land many years ago. “Buy land?” said the chief. “You must be crazy—you don’t buy the wind or the water or the trees.”

When, in 1890, the first white pioneers— emissaries of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Afri- ca Company (BSAC)—trekked up from South Africa, they came to prospect for gold. ‘The BSAC struck a deal with Lobengula, king of the Ndebele—a deal that dwelt exclusively on min- eral rights. But El Dorado this proved not to be.

Soon the white pioneers clashed with and defeated Lobengula’s warriors, and Rhodes granted 700 white men large tracts of land ina

ZIMBABWE: A LAND POSSESSED 111

te

Era’s | vy | id En route to what remains of her family’s land, Tara Alford looks out on acres of sugarcane on a neighbor's farm mostly resettled by the government. Across southern Africa whites face losses as the region confronts land reform and its own colonial past.

country where the African population numbered perhaps 900,000. Subsequent whites obtained their land from the BSAC, but tribal authorities were never compensated.

In 1896 first the Ndebele and then the Shona tribes rebelled in a chimurenga, or war, against white occupation. Thousands of blacks and nearly 400 whites were killed in an 18-month revolt, which failed, leaving much of the land in white hands.

As white rule was established, and modern medicine introduced, the population in the reserves—the mostly drier, less fertile areas into which rural blacks were confined—increased. By 1950 blacks in what was then Southern Rhodesia numbered two million, and white immigrants were being recruited from Europe to buy farms with low-interest loans.

When the hard-line white conservative party of Ian Smith came to power in 1962, the stage was set for collision. Aiming to prevent black rule, in 1965 Smith declared unilateral independence from Britain. By 1972 black opposition to white rule had boiled over into civil war—the second chimurenga, as the nationalist guerrillas called it. Perhaps 30,000 blacks died in the fighting,

112 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * AUGUST 2003

many of them civilians; on the white side, just as in the first chimurenga, it was the farmers who found themselves on the front line. Guerrillas killed more than 1,500 whites by the time the guns were stilled in 1980.

wenty-two years after the war, in the

thick of Mugabe's fast-track land reform

program, you might have believed it had never ended. Every night the main news bul- letin on Zimbabwe’s state-controlled TV was interspersed with commercials extolling the land-seizure program. “Chave chimurenga— Now it’s war,” the jingle went.

Although white farm owners have been the principal target of Mugabe’s land campaign, it is the black farmworkers and their families who have become its main victims. So far 1.2 million of them have been displaced. Bigson Gumbeze is a project manager for displaced farmworkers at the Zimbabwe Community Development Trust, a private organization devoted to aiding workers affected by the land reform program.

One morning Gumbeze and I drove east out of Harare with a delivery of donated clothes. At the balancing granite boulders of Epworth, the

hard-top road narrowed then ran out altogether until we came to Rock Haven refugee camp, an expanse of olive tents where about 200 farm- workers had been living for the past six months. The refugees sat, mostly barefoot and ragged, under a grove of msasa trees as Gumbeze and his assistants doled out their bounty. Most of the refugees were workers from one farm, Chi- pesa, owned by Iain Kay. He had openly cam- paigned for the opposition party in the disputed 2002 general election that returned Mugabe to power—and paid the price with his farm.

“One day,” said James Sani, one of the Chi- pesa refugees, “the war vets and party youth arrived on our farm and said it belonged to them now. They put a gun to Iain Kay. The vets beat us with iron bars and axes, and they looted our property and chased us away.”

Another Chipesa worker, Armando Serima, who had come to Zimbabwe from Mozam- bique as a small boy, spoke up. “They called us muvengi, enemy, because they said we sup- ported the opposition party. We hid in the bush eating roots and leaves and begging food from other farmworkers at night, until Mr. Kay came and found us hiding there in the mountains just when we were about to die of hunger, and he brought us here.”

“So we have nothing,” Sani added. “I was born at the farm, grew up at the farm, went to school on the farm, worked for the past eight years on the farm. My father died on the farm. All we know is farming. That’s what we want to do again.”

Zimbabwe's agriculture is most apparent

from the air. As I circled over some of the country’s prime land, I saw not freshly tilled land planted for the new season but empty fields devoid of activity. “It’s nothing less than the wholesale dismantling of the agricultural sec- tor, the backbone of the entire economy,” said John Makumbe. A professor of political science at the University of Zimbabwe, Makumbe is also the national chairman of Trans- parency International, a global organization that fights corrup- tion. “Agrarian reform has to be holistic. You

I t seems a vain hope. The devastation to

Videotake: Photographer Gideon Mendel shares tense moments working in Zim- babwe. Forum: Post your thoughts on land redistribu- tion. Both at nationalgeo graphic.com/ngm/0308.

don’t just allocate land; you must put infra- structure in place, financial support, training. None of that was done. So both in the medium and long term we are looking at a crippled agricultural sector in Zimbabwe.”

And a crippled financial system as well. “White farmers, because they weren’t compen- sated, have walked away from their farms owing millions of dollars to the banks. At least two banks have already collapsed, and the rest are teetering on the brink. We're in a new situation,” said Makumbe.

Parts of Africa have expressed support for Zimbabwe's transformation, seen as the right- ing of historic wrongs. In Namibia, President Sam Nujoma has his eye on the large white ranches that make up a disproportionate part of his country’s agricultural land. Following Zimbabwe’s example, Nujoma has threatened to replace the country’s current willing-seller land redistribution program with one of forced transfers. South Africa, the regional powerhouse, is itself struggling with land reform, and Pres- ident Thabo Mbeki, through his inaction, has given tacit approval to Mugabe’s land revolution. South Africa’s original goal was to redistribute 30 percent of white-owned land to landless blacks by 1999. But so far less than 5 percent has been transferred, and the target date has been pushed back to 2015.

There are also African voices raised against what has been happening in Zimbabwe. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer, compares the Zimbabwean land pro- gram with Stalin’s land collectivization in the Soviet Union, designed to get rid of the kulaks, the prerevolutionary farmers whom Stalin saw as a political threat. And Archbishop Desmond Tutu, another Nobel laureate, has characterized Mugabe’s presidency as “almost a caricature of all the things people think black African lead- ers do. He seems to be wanting to make a car- toon of himself.”

There may not be agreement within Zimba- bwe and across Africa about the land transfer program, but no one disputes that Zimbabwe's century-old system of large-scale commercial farms, some of the most productive in Africa, is gone. And it seems clear that the chaotic, violent manner of its passing will scar the country—and perhaps keep it hungry—for years to come. 0

ZIMBABWE: A LAND POSSESSED 113

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

< WN 7

Come Hungry

BY RAPHAEL KADUSHIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID McLAIN

a & ™ >... ‘ si ; my , > Yes, and coleslaw

are inside Primanti’s cheese- steak sandwich, a staple in Steeitown’s Strip.

- cS « ie

_*

Ea rly one MOPNINg at Primanti Brothers, in the middle of Pittsburgh’s Strip Dis- trict, Antonia Corradetti is constructing a sand- wich so big it would make Dagwood blanch. A fixture behind the long diner counter, she flips a wad of just grilled corned beef onto a thick slice of Italian bread. Then, yanking a basket of oil-dripping french fries directly from the deep fryer, she plunges her bare hand into the heap, extracts a fistful of steaming potatoes, and smashes them on top of the beef, so you can hear the sizzle when the smoking spuds greet the meat. Surprised there is no echoing sizzle com- ing from Corradetti’s hand, I’m ready to dial 911, but she seems indif- ferent to her five-finger fire walk.

“I’ve only been doing this for 28 years,” she says with a shrug, in a strong Italian accent. “I can do a thousand of these an hour.” But the pain? “Well the first time I did it, it was kinda hot, but the grill is a good conditioner.” Corradetti laughs, holding out beautifully manicured hands as soft as a baby’s cheek.

Locals call Corradetti’s literal handiwork the official Strip sandwich— not just because others have copied it but because it mirrors the district’s own history. Dating back to 1933, when the Strip was still the exclusive turf of wholesalers delivering produce out of mammoth brick warehouses, the sandwich was aimed at a fail-proof market. For the truckers who were Strip royalty, nothing tasted better than the meat-and-potatoes meal they could hold in one big hand, while they steered with the other.

Now the sandwich is consumed mostly by late-night clubbers, but it

AREA: 22 city blocks RESTAURANTS: 35 PENNSYLVANIA MACARONI CO’S CHEESE SALES: 8,000 pounds

a week

PRIMANTI SANDWICHES SERVED WEEKLY: 6,000 CALORIES IN A PRIMANTI CHEESESTEAK: About 1,000

NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO CARE: Zero

° 'Harrisburg™

When dusk falls, the Strip transforms from daytime food emporium into all- night playground. As cafés and clubs come alive, revelers vie for parking and bar space. A 3 a.m. crowd packs Primanti Brothers (above), where muscular sandwiches

are served 24-7.

Arrange a meeting with Congress.

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still signifies the way the Strip guards its traditions, starting with its own defining look. Forget designer makeovers. You can see Pittsburgh’s high-rises in the near distance, just to the south, but the restless development largely stops at the Strip’s border, where the hulking brick buildings still throw long shadows like some- thing out of a Hopper painting.

The district’s survival, though, was never a sure thing. It under- went a slow decline that began in the Depression, when the ware- houses first started to lose business. But by the 1970s the wholesalers were opening retail shops, and by the ’90s a fresh generation of style setters had moved in, launching the boutiques, galleries, and dance clubs now lining Penn Avenue, the Strip’s version of Main Street. The inevitable con- version of warehouses into lofts followed, and the Strip morphed from homey to high style.

Now the neighborhood maintains a delicate balancing act between old and new, one that plays 24 hours a day. I fuel my 24 with a fresh-brewed cappuccino at La Prima, surrounded by shop owners swapping gossip and rustling Italian newspapers. At 10 a.m. I’m mingling with the crowds

at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, where the standard blocks of

mozzarella have been joined by French Brie, English Stilton, and Danish blue, though the clerks still slice the cheese with attitude (“What you want, hon?”). Serious eaters usually follow with a wedge of torta rustica at Il Piccolo Forno. “I bake every night from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.,” Antonio Branduzzi says, as he bags an almond popover for me, “but it’s worth it. I came here from Lucca, Italy, 17 years ago, and I felt right at home. Maybe because a lot of Lucca was already here.”

Down at Parma Sausage, another obligatory morning pit stop, owner Luigi Spinabelli also feels at home, despite his own bumpier transition when he came over from Italy in 1954. “Everything you touched in Pitts- burgh then turned you black it was so dirty,” he says, “and every time a streetcar passed by, the salami we smoked in our living room would swing, so we thought the whole building would fall down.”

Today the meat sits out in Parma Sausage’s long jewel box of a deli case, overseen by Luigi's daughter, Rina. She always knew she'd be part of the

“The senses, the ability to enjoy taste and texture are gifts that God gives us.”

—TOM JOHNSON

Bone-licking ribs attract soul-food fans on Satur- days, when ethnic food stalls and street vendors Jam the Strip. “That's when everybody in Pittsburgh comes together,” says the Reverend Tom Johnson (above). “It's a pilgrim- age.” A welder downs a crunchy lunch at Triangle Welding, a thriving busi- ness true to the area's blue-collar roots.

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PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

family business. “When my parents brought me back from the hospital, the first thing they did was hang a lovely mobile of big salamis above my crib,” Rina says with a laugh.

Many morning shoppers in the Strip have their own visceral mem- ories. A few blocks from Parma, at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, the older Polish worshipers recall the day in 1935 when the banana warehouse still sitting sheepishly across the street-—suddenly exploded, fracturing the chapel’s turrets. “It can be dangerous,” Father McKenna muses, “to use gas when you're ripening fruit.”

Around the corner on Penn Avenue, at Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor, owner Ray Klavon relives another neighborhood trauma. “My father was trapped on top of the parlor phone booth for an entire night during the 1936 flood,” he says. “He was finally hauled through the window into a rowboat, and he wasn’t a small man.”

By afternoon nostalgia wanes, and Tuscan hill town gives way to global village, as young urbanites start to prowl the boutiques. “The people who want the best coffee and cheese are also the kind of people who want the best decorative objects,” Keneva Fecko, co-owner of Hot Haute Hot, says, pointing to a shelf of scented candles. “Hollywood,” she assures me, “is all over these.”

The Strip’s fusion act comes fully to life at night, when casual eateries like Primanti and chic restaurants like Lidia’s fill up and the pierced kids outside the Rosebud dance club compare tattoos with the last of the Strip’s truckers.

For Lucy Sheets, a Vietnamese immigrant, the spectacle is worth her own epic hours. “I never miss one night,” she says, flipping the chicken kabobs she cooks on a sidewalk grill. “Last night I was grilling until 4 a.m.” As she places a new skewer on the heat, we watch the crowds: the Prada brigade bursting out of a sushi bar, a warehouse workman haul- ing a crate of fruit, and what looks like Antonio heading to the bakery. It’s midnight, and I’m ready to end my own day early, but Sheets is still wide-awake and cooking. “I return to Vietnam for a few months every

winter,” she says. But every spring she’s back to catch the show. O

“We're saving the world... one biscotti at a time.”

—LARRY LAGATTUTA

Sounds of Sinatra lure patrons into a lindy hop while they wait at Enrico’s Biscotti Co., where bakers make 1,200 pounds of the headliner cookies every day. “We cook, talk, dance, drink,” says owner Larry Lagattuta (above). “Sometimes pandemonium breaks out.”

WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE

Find more 15222 images along with field notes and resources at nationalgeo graphic.com/ngm/0308. Tell us why we should cover

| at nationalgeographic | .com/ngm/zipcode/0308.

Teacher Mara Sidmore ives the theater.

Just ask the fifth grade students she teaches every day. But when it came to her retirement

portfolio, she Wanted a little less drama. So she turned to us,

a fund manager

own for a steady hand. In these volatile times, we can help

people build portfolios that are anything but. Now she saves all the theatrics for the stage.

Log on for ideas, advice, and results. TIAA-CREF.org.

\ or call 800.842.1924

hel

: : i]

“Ae = mam

a crerF ae aging | y for people

__Y r other things to think about.”

fi Maga Sidmore became ajparticipant in 2000. TIAA-CREF Individual and Institutional Services, Inc., and Teachers Personal Investors y Services, Inc., distribute securities products, © 2002 Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association - College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), New York, NY. Mara Sidmore was co pensated.

ONE THAT ALMOST GOT AWAY

~ Final Edit

Home Stretch

Viscacha on the rocks: Just what photographer Joel

Sartore needed. He snapped about 400 pictures of

this mother and baby viscacha—a relative of the

chinchilla—in Chile’s Atacama Desert. “I’ve been

known to shoot 20 or 30 rolls of one subject,”

Sartore says. “There’s a lot of time between good

photographic opportunities, so when you get one,

you tend to smother it.” In this case only two frames

caught the baby in full stretch. This particular image

was Joel’s favorite, but ultimately a portrait of a

lone adult was chosen for the article. “The animal

on page 66 was lighter than the background and

popped out,” says illustrations editor Dennis

Dimick. “And its illumination and simple com- Cut it or keep it? Find out

position made the image work at a small size.” more about what tipped the balance for this photo and send it as an electronic greeting card at nationalgeo graphic.com/ngm/0308.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST 2003

it. Now,

NICODE

NICOTINE TRANSDERMAL SYSTEM

You can wear just one NicoDerm CQ patch for tor SMoxina 10 16 hours, during the day, or for a full 24 hours to get a jump on

morning cravings. It gives you the kind of help you need. ¥. For a better chance to quit.

You're not a superhero. You don't have to be.

RM CQ

DOESUTLO EXP ELGI TON

Trial by Jungle

Three months on the Amazon weight-loss plan

ooking back, writer Scott ace laughs when he

thinks about his prepara- tions for his trip through the Amazon, “I'd already been going to the gym a lot,” he says, “but nothing in my life prepared me for the deprivation and phys- ical exertion of three months in the wilderness.”

Scott (below, with expedition leader Sydney Possuelo) and photographer Nicolas Reynard (left, standing on a 60-foot-long

on what we could hunt or fish,” says Scott, “so the fare was— let’s call it meager, usually tough monkey meat in a stinky broth, I lost 30 pounds on the trip.” One day Scott's feet went out from under him while following the team’s bushwhacking scouts. As he fell, a razor-sharp sapling, hacked off by the machete- wielding scouts, tore through his shirt and nearly impaled him. “After that,” he says, “I decided I could handle the hunger. I just wanted to avoid serious injury.” And ifhe had been ew =

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + AUGUST. 2003

iar,

ON ASSIGNMENT

Survival of the Fitted

The hazards of working in Alaska

he survival suit may look

a little large on photogra-

pher Susie Post Rust, but passengers on the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge’s research vessel Tiglax have to learn how to put one

on in case they’re plunged into the Bering Sea’s 40°F waters. “With it, you're supposed to survive up to 24 hours,” Susie reports. “Without it, you proba- bly wouldn't last an hour.” There were dangers above the Bering too. Twice the engine on the small plane from which she

shot aerial views stalled in mid-

air. “The plane goes silent, you

know the water is icy, and the

impact would kill you anyway.

The second time it happened,

I said, OK, that’s it, I’m done.” To be available to shoot in the

MO SAITC

summer, when most wildlife researchers work, Susie had to move her wedding date from June to May. But her fiancé, Adam Rust, took it in stride: He’d been to Alaska with her, and knew why its beauty was drawing her back.

WORLDWIDE

“The closing picture in the Zimbabwe story was taken from the back of this truck,” explains photographer Gideon Mendel (below). It belongs to the Alford family, who had been evicted from their land but were commut ing with their laborers to help farm it. Today they again live on

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

part of it. Gideon grew up in South Africa in “a family opposed to apartheid, and | went into photog- raphy as a tool to show what was happening.” Work has taken him to neighboring Zimbabwe eight times since 1992. “It used to

be such an open, receptive place to photograph,” he says. “It's

SALLY ALFORD

+ AUGUST 2003

upsetting now to see the fear, the anger, the frustration.”

Writer Raphael Kadushin insists he gained no weight while report- ing on the food and fun in Pitts: burgh’s Strip District. “I'm a contributing editor to Bon Appétit, so I'm used to sampling food,” he says. “You do what wine tasters do—you sample small portions.” In an ice cream parlor that had once been a pharmacy he found that some of the old remedies were still on hand in the original boxes. One was an anti-anxiety medication called Sedative #2, whose main ingredient was can- nabis. (No samples were tested.)

w ITE EXCLUSIVE

Find more stories from our authors and photographers, including their best, worst, and quirkiest experiences, at nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0308.

Legal Notice

If You Purchased the Drug Cardizem® CD

or any of its AB3-Rated Generic Equivalents From January 1, 1998 through January 29, 2003

You May be Entitled to a Recovery

This notice is to inform you of the proposed settlement of a lawsuit brought by the Attorneys General of the 50 States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia under which you may be entitled to

make a claim for a recovery for your purchases of

the brand name drug Cardizem” CD or its AB3- rated generic equivalents.

What is the Lawsuit About?

The Attorneys General have alleged that certain Defendants violated the antitrust laws and, as a result, consumers were overcharged for their purchases of Cardizem® CD or any of its AB3-rated generic equivalents. Defendants have denied any wrongdoing or liability.

What are the Terms of the Settlement? Under the proposed Settlement, approximately $21,000,000.00 will be set aside to pay consumers related to purchases of the drugs.

Who Can Benefit from the Settlement?

If you are a consumer who purchased Cardizem® CD or any of its AB3-rated generic equivalents from January 1, 1998 through Januray 29, 2003 (“Relevant Period”), you are a member of the Settlement Class and can file a claim for a recovery. If you had a prescription for Cardizem” CD from your physician, an AB3-rated generic equivalent product is one that can be legally substituted for Cardizem® CD by your pharmacist.

What are My Legal Rights?

If you wish to remain a member of the Settlement Class, you do not need to take any action to remain a member. However, to share in the Settlement Fund you must file a claim as discussed below. If the Court approves the proposed Settlement, you will be bound by all orders of the Court and any legal claims you may have against the Defendants relating to the conduct alleged in the lawsuit will be released.

If you do not wish to remain a member of the Settlement Class, you must mail a written request for exclusion, postmarked by September 22, 2003, to the Cardizem” CD Consumer Settlement Administrator at the address below.

How Can a Claim be Filed?

If you remain a member of the Settlement Class and you wish to submit a claim against the settlement fund, you must submit your claim by September 23, 2003, to the Cardizem® CD Consumer Settlement Administrator. A claim can be registered by visiting the www.cardizemsettlement.com website, calling the toll-free number below, or writing the Settlement Administrator at the address listed below.

The Court will hold a final approval hearing on the proposed Settlement on October 1, 2003 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time in the Courtroom of the Honorable Nancy G. Edmunds, at the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, 231 W. Lafayette Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan 48226.

For Complete Information, a Copy of the Notice of Proposed Settlement, and to Register a Claim:

call: 1-800-372-2406 or Visit: WWW.Cardizemsettlement.com

Or Write: Cardizem® CD Consumer Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 1675, Faribault, MN 55021-1675

Clerk of the Court, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan

PLEASE DO NOT CONTACT THE COURT

FROM OUR